Save Women’s Sports posted an item yesterday:

The Save Women’s Sports flag was raised this morning over Nashua City Hall, where it will be flying through Friday! Thank you to Beth Scaer for your dedication to our movement! Ask your city if they offer this option and we can send a flag your way!

But it got taken down today. A Nashua group page patted itself on the back for silencing women.

Yesterday morning, a flag was raised over Nashua City Hall in support of a transphobic organization, with the expectation that it would continue to fly until Friday. As word spread through the community, the response was clear – this isn’t what Nashua stands for. Many folks reached out to Nashua government officials and city employees, others posted publicly about the issue. As of this morning at 8:30 AM, the flag is down.

Many thanks to Jim Donchess for your quick response, Jan Schmidt and Jenn Morton and Mutual Aid & Defense NH for the calls to action, and everyone else who stood up for our Trans neighbors. Hate has no home in Nashua, full stop. I’m looking forward to updated guidelines from the The City of Nashua regarding usage of the Citizens’ Flag Pole to ensure that future flag requests are vetted more carefully.

It’s not “hate” to say that women’s sports should be for women, or that women have the right to have sports for women. If women can’t have sports for women then they can’t ever win at anything. It’s not “hate” to say that’s not a good outcome.

It’s probably the case that trans women are a bit stuck if hormones make them less strong than the average male, but it’s still also the case that it shouldn’t be women’s job to solve that problem. Maybe that’s just the price trans women have to pay, or maybe they can continue to play on men’s teams despite the disadvantage, or maybe they’ll decide sport just isn’t in their future anymore, but what they don’t get to do is trash women’s sport.

First, the wildly dishonest ad:

Next, Fauci’s emphatic disavowal of the ad’s use of something he said months ago.

Dr. Anthony Fauci did not consent to being featured in a new advertisement from the Trump campaign touting President Donald Trump‘s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert told CNN his words were taken out of context.

“In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate. The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials,” Fauci said in a statement provided exclusively to CNN when asked if he agreed to be featured in the ad.

…

“President Trump is recovering from the coronavirus, and so is America,” the ad’s narrator says. “Together we rose to meet the challenge, protecting our seniors, getting them life-saving drugs in record time, sparing no expense.”

It takes quite a brass nerve to say that when cases are going up.

The ad then flashes to an interview with Fauci in which he says, “I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.”

Though no date is provided in the ad, Fauci’s quote is from an interview with Fox News in March. During that interview, Fauci praised the White House coronavirus task force’s round-the-clock effort to respond to the pandemic, which he says included numerous White House meetings and late-night phone calls.

Awesome. They won’t let him talk to the press, but they do steal something he said in another context months ago for a lying “elect Trump again” ad. Now that’s integrity.

Blegh.

Also – it’s Rowling like rolling, not Rowling like howling. Rowl as in bowl, not as in cowl. English is completely wack and pronounces words randomly, whatever the spelling.

H/t Pliny

James Barry on Ireland and women and the new woke erasure of women:

Enough now, Irish Twitter libfems. (Irish rant coming up). JUST because you made some noise for Repeal, and gained a few followers, does NOT make you the gatekeeper for “Irish feminism.” You’re NOT the person who forevermore gets to say “this is what Irish women are, or want.” 

It wasn’t just the young and woke who caused Repeal to happen.

Ireland was awful for a young woman in the 50s & 60s & 70s & 80s- and even 90s. ALL the women who lived through those terrible times, had a voice in the Repeal the 8th Referendum. The “repeal” doesn’t belong to any one group. 

…

Women’s issues in Ireland need to be treated with great care, kindness, respect, and truth. Even more so than in any other State or jurisdiction. To compensate for the very OPPOSITE way they were treated in the past.  EVERY SINGLE WOMEN’S ISSUE in Ireland needs to be examined on its own merits, weighed, looked at, in context of the past. We don’t get to obliterate women. We did that so much in the past that it is a National Shame.

Do you need me to list the shame? The Magdalene Laundries? The babies sold to America, torn from sobbing girls? The symphysiotomies? The women dead in childbirth for lack of healthcare (and I mean contraception)?

The rape and abuse of women and children, sanctioned by the Church? That abuse, covered up for generations? The girl dead in a grotto? The insult of a septic tank in Tuam?

And even, through the decades, in the small, personal stories: the menace of the parochial house, with wandering fingers. The “marriage ban”. The persistent sexual abuse and assaults in schools, in any place where a sexual predator could rise to a position of power. 

But now it’s all different, we’re told…but that’s a lie.

Because now, our new masters are the “Official Irish Feminists” who speak for All Irish Women. These self-appointed spokeswomen speak for All Irish Women, and they do so gracefully and with authori-tayyy, using the nice pedestals they got during Repeal. 

“The word “Woman” is merely a construct!” they tell us, gaily, while popping in to do a podcast with their fab woke chums. “Feminism includes Everyone Who Wants to Be a Woman!” they chirrup, while writing a column for the Phoenix about De Feminism.

They yawn at the woman in her 60s, still broken from a symphisiotomy age 23, who needs to tell her story. They’re not interested in the woman in her 50s who had to give up her baby when she was 16. They don’t much care for the girls who were abused in school in the 80s. Nope.

Because we don’t have “women’s issues” any more. Because it’s a New Ireland, now. And the word “Woman” has been excised from the literature of the Health Service Executive. Because it’s “discriminatory”. 

He’s talking about the HSE on cervical cancer:

The Health Service Executive has defended a decision to remove references to “women” in its online information about cervical cancer screening.

Under changes made last December, the HSE’s webpage about the screening programme refers to “anyone with a cervix” rather than “women” or a “woman”.

Because that’s “kinder” to men who say they are women…but much less “kind” to actual women, but that doesn’t matter because men who say they are women are more important than women. New boss just like the old boss.

Read it all; it’s outstanding.

“Misleading” is a polite way of putting it.

Twitter on Sunday added a warning label to a tweet from President Donald Trump, who tested positive for the coronavirus and said he is no longer contagious. 

Trump tweeted on Sunday that he received a “total and complete sign off from White House Doctors yesterday.”

“That means I can’t get it (immune), and can’t give it,” the president added. “Very nice to know!!!”

So he’s admitting that he didn’t “know” that before and thus knew he was being reckless with other people’s lives. Surprise surprise.

The tweet contains “misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19,” the Twitter label says. It remains accessible because “Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest.” 

It’s potentially harmful in encouraging others to be reckless with other people’s lives. Trump is like a chain reaction of danger to others.

White House physician Sean Conley said in a statement Saturday evening that Trump “is no longer considered a transmission risk to others.” 

Considered by whom, though? Conley is so weaselly that it’s hard to see that statement as reliable.

Trump’s flagged tweet came after a Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, during which the president first claimed to be “immune” to the coronavirus.

“It looks like I’m immune for, I don’t know, maybe a long time, maybe a short time,” Trump told Bartiromo. “It could be a lifetime. Nobody really knows.” 

That’s interesting because his tweet is much less cautious.

How can they do that?

I don’t understand how they have the authority to do that. Fauci is not an employee of Trump’s, and anyway employers don’t generally have the power to control what employees do in their own time, do they? I don’t understand what this “blocked” means.

Axios elaborates:

The White House refused to allow Anthony Fauci or any of the medical experts on the coronavirus task force to appear on ABC’s “This Week,” host Jon Karl said Sunday.

But why is it a matter of the White House “allowing” any medical expert on the task force to go on a news show?

There are lines of work where you’re not allowed to share everything you know – the law, intelligence gathering, research, and so on. Doctors can’t blab patient information, and there’s doubtless a long list of items like that. But this? Just “shut up because you’ll make us look bad”? Is it really that simple? The White House can enforce it?

I suppose it can be just that they say we’ll remove you from the task force if you do, and they don’t want to be removed because they hope to be able to steer Trump in the right direction.

President Trump has previously faced criticism for silencing Fauci, and White House officials have refused to answer basic questions about President Trump’s COVID test results, as it scrambles to respond to an outbreak within its own ranks.

…

The president is facing a credibility gap on the coronavirus issue. An ABC News/Washington Post poll out Sunday indicates 62% of Americans distrust what Trump says about the coronavirus, and 60% said they don’t trust the administration to provide accurate information about Trump’s health.

Sooooo the way to fix that is to silence Fauci.

They don’t think too good, do they.

“We had hoped to talk to Dr. Fauci about both the outbreak at the White House and across the country,” Karl said at the start of the show.

“He was more than willing to join us, but the White House wouldn’t allow you to hear from the nation’s leading expert on coronavirus.”

“In fact, they wouldn’t allow any of the medical experts on the president’s own coronavirus task force to appear on this show.”

Well, it’s looking as if in three weeks plus a couple of days they’ll be facing the consequences.

Good catch.

How the BBC words it:

Speaking to BBC Sport in August, Grace McKenzie, a trans woman who plays for Golden Gate Women’s rugby club in San Francisco, said she was worried “that other sporting federations will look at World Rugby and begin to second-guess the existing science that supports trans women’s inclusion in sport, and begin to make policies based out of a place of fear instead of a place of logic and reason”.

“I want to be able to participate fully with my team and in the sport that I love. I think that there is still a path forward to allow us to do that,” she said.

Former Great Britain swimmer Sharron Davies, who has been vocal on the issue of trans women in elite sport, also welcomed World Rugby’s decision.

The 57-year-old, a silver medallist at the 1980 Olympics, posted on social media: “If we, as a fair society, want equal opportunities for females to medals, team places, safe sport and scholarships, with all the associations, rewards and careers, sport must be based on biological sex.”

I guess “the 57-year-olds” aren’t supposed to have opinions?

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Like shards of glass stuck in your brain.

I have just read the Croatian writer Daša Drndić’s extraordinary novel-cum-documentary, ‘Trieste’, which is about the destruction of the Italian Jews. A number of Jewish families gave their children to the Catholic Church for safe-keeping. After the defeat of Naziism & the Fascists, the Catholic Church refused to return the children to their families. Monsignor Angelo Roncall, papal nuncio to France and future Pope John XXIII was required to ensure that the Church retained supervision and guardianship over Jewish children who were baptised. Jewish children who had been baptised were on no account to be handed over to Jewish agencies with responsibility for the care of children, since these agencies could not guarantee the further Christian upbringing of these Jewish children, and could not be reunited with their families, assuming these had survived, who would not agree to continue their Christian upbringing…

This of course meant that virtually none of these Jewish children were reunited with their families. The Church used every bureaucratic obfuscation in order to prevent it.

I recommend reading pages 280-284 of ‘Trieste’ (at least – read the whole thing if you can), from which I have adapted the above.

Why? Because the Church’s first priority is ‘saving souls’. Unbaptised children’s fate after death was anomalous (though there was limbo for centuries), and the fate of children brought up in Judaism was, well… unless they were baptised and brought into the Catholic faith. Therefore the Church is permitted, in following the higher commands of God, to ignore any human law and to behave in the most dishonest and inhumane ways in order to ensure that its first priority is maintained.

The same applies to abortion, of course, so that the Church is perfectly happy that a woman should go to prison for many years for having a miscarriage or that an adolescent girl impregnated by some close relative or raped by some man should have to bear the child, as happens in El Salvador, where there is a ban on abortion in any circumstances that the Church supports. But souls are being saved! For unwanted babies or babies who will not survive outside the womb or may kill their mothers in childbirth may be christened.

This putting of ‘God’s law’ above any human law, so that the latter may be broken or twisted with impunity in the name of the former, runs through Catholicism, whose priests are really mages, able to perform the powerfully magical act, conferred by God, of turning wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ. One need only read Chesterton, whom I now loathe with a passion though I enjoyed his Father Brown stories in youth when I didn’t recognise their implications. There is a fascination in them with the immense power conferred by God on ministering priests, who are therefore quite within their rights to break mere human law. Father Brown, being God’s representative on earth, is able to act as a god, and he and Chesterton rejoice in it.

Hoo-boy.

In several phone calls last weekend from the presidential suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Mr. Trump shared an idea he was considering: When he left the hospital, he wanted to appear frail at first when people saw him, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. But underneath his button-down dress shirt, he would wear a Superman T-shirt, which he would reveal as a symbol of strength when he ripped open the top layer.

Very adult, very sensible, very even keel, very normal and ok.

Cancel everything. Better safe than sorry. Broadway World tells us:

Richmond Triangle Players has released the following statement announcing the cancellation of its production of “The Second Coming of Joan of Arc”, original scheduled to run in-person and streaming through October 10, 2020.

“After weeks of rehearsals and steady preparation to open our production of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, we discovered a great number of views and opinions expressed by and endorsed on the playwright’s personal Facebook page that, after intense investigation and research, we believe to be transphobic.”

So it takes “intense investigation and research” to decide that the playwright’s opinions are transphobic? And even then it’s only their belief? And for that they think it’s worthwhile canceling a play after weeks of work by a number of people?

When have women ever been favored with this level of anxious research into possible misogyny? Ever? The most indisputable rank stinking misogyny gets dismissed with a wave of the hand, or a laugh, but perceived “transphobia” is a reason to mess with a lot of people’s work and livelihoods and artistic pleasure. It’s crazy.

This decision was not made frivolously or lightly, and comes after days of serious and thorny discussions. Our actor and creative team had put together a beautiful production that was ready to open. But now more than ever before, Richmond Triangle Players must use its leadership voice to stand in solidarity with our trans siblings, especially at a time when marginalized voices must be heard louder than before.

Unless the marginalized voices belong to women. Those can be ignored entirely, and canceled at will. The playwright, of course, is a woman, Carolyn Gage. This wouldn’t have happened if she were a man.

The Postmillenial comments:

Staging a play is no small undertaking. It is costly, there are a lot of people involved, and a great deal of time consuming prep on the part of actors, director, designers, tech personnel, marketing people, fundraisers. There are meetings that have to be attended, rehearsals scheduled and planned, lines learned, blocking notated. It is a laborious and involved task to put a show together. There’s even this old theatrical phrase that says “the show must go on.” All of that to say that the cancelling of a show isn’t a decision made lightly.

Unless there’s an opportunity to squawk “Transphobia!!”

H/t Sackbut

Originally a comment by iknklast on Shame and fear of damnation.

It has taken decades of therapy and hard work to overcome the intense feelings of shame and fear of damnation that she said marked her childhood.

This. So much this. I have been out of Christianity for over 40 years, and I still deal with this nearly every day. It is like shards of glass stuck in your brain. No matter how much you know on an intellectual level that these are fallacious beliefs, that you are not a bad person, you still respond to certain things in the way you have been trained to respond. I have been trying to root out those shards of glass in many years of therapy, and when I think I have gotten them all, I leave therapy, sigh with relief, and go about my business. Until a new one shows up. And the wounds fester. They become infected. They ooze pus into your whole being that can consume you if you don’t have the strength or support to resist.

In addition, people like me, like Barrett, are raised to believe everyone else is wrong. I moved past that, thanks to falling into a set in high school that helped me examine my beliefs. Barrett has not moved past that. You should not put someone on the SCOTUS if they have such a view, if they cannot listen to other arguments without having already decided they are wrong. That is dangerously dogmatic.

I would be perfectly happy if the Catholic contingent on the court decreased until it was just Sonia Sotomayor. She is one who appears to be able to keep her religion and her work separate. The rest? Not so much.

This again:

From the article:

More than 500 students and alumni at Oxford have come together to sign an open letter condemning “two professors with a history of transphobia”.

The letter expresses disappointment and distress over the controversial appointment of professors Selina Todd and Senia Paseta to lead a new programme on Women’s Equality and Inequality at the Oxford Martin School. Accusing the Martin School of ‘tacitly sanction(ing)’ the views of Professor Todd and Professor Paseta, the signatories raises concerns about a “hostile and exclusionary environment”.

Blah blah blah blah. This is the new “left” now: the chief enemy is women.

You already know this, but: they are not phobic. Saying that men are not women is not phobic. Disobeying orders to say that men are women is not phobic. Refusing to pretend to believe a nonsense claim is not phobic.

Professor Todd, a member of Women’s Place UK, has previously criticized the LGBT rights charity Stonewall for failing to “support academic freedom of thought” and presenting “anti-scientific claims… as objective fact”.

That’s not phobic. It may or may not be accurate but it’s not phobic.

In 2018, Professor Todd also shared a petition calling on the British Film Institute to remove transgender activist Munroe Bergdorf as a speaker at its women’s summit.

That’s not phobic.

Imagine someone – say, Nikole Hannah-Jones – called on an organization to remove Rachel Dolezal as a speaker at a BLM summit. That would not be phobic.

Professor Todd has repeatedly denied allegations of transphobia, instead describing herself on her website as a “gender-critical feminist”. She claims that, on the issue of self ID, ‘months of research’ led her to the conclusion that “to support transpeople’s rights… would harm the rights of women, because so often what is being asked for is free access to women-only spaces”.

That’s not phobic.

Professor Paseta has also attracted criticism. In 2018, she joined Professor Todd in an open letter to the Labour Party, which called on then-leader Jeremy Corbyn to “uphold their right to sex-segregated spaces”. The letter went on to denounce the terms ‘TERF’ and ‘cis’ being used to describe women.

Still not phobic.

Just one giant platform, that’s what.

The BBC leans heavily on one side of the scale again.

LGBT rights campaigners have criticised World Rugby’s decision to prevent transgender women from competing at the highest levels of the women’s game.

Some have, and others have praised it.

LGBT charity Stonewall says it is “deeply disappointed” with the decision.

“The proposals were based on hypothetical data modelling that has little relevance to the questions of fairness and safety in rugby that the policy review sought to address,” said Stonewall chief executive Nancy Kelley.

Don’t be schewpid. Men are bigger and stronger than women, so letting them play on women’s teams is not fair as well as not safe. Parents don’t call for evidence before telling Joe age 14 to stop beating up Jane age 14; they know it’s not fair.

“Important policies like this should be based on robust, relevant evidence and work closely with trans people playing in the sport.”

What about the importance to women? Eh? What about that? Why are we always supposed to put men who say they are women first and women nowhere?

Transgender men remain permitted to play men’s contact rugby union, but the sport’s governing body says a review of its existing guidelines had concluded that “safety and fairness cannot presently be assured for women competing against trans women in contact rugby”.

And why is that? Because of human sexual dimorphism. Everybody knows that, but we’re supposed to ignore it or even lie it out of existence now.

Thus we are reminded why intense religious cults are not benign.

Rebekah Powers was 11 when members of her faith group, the People of Praise, gathered around as she sat on a chair and laid their hands on her to pray. Powers’ sister had shown a gift for speaking in tongues, a defining trait of the followers of the small charismatic Christian community, and Rebekah was expected to do the same.

She couldn’t do it.

“I couldn’t get it, and I stayed there an hour and a half before they gave up and finally said, ‘You just have blockage. You need to just work on your sin and be more open,” she said.

There. That’s why. She was eleven. “Sin” is not real.

She left the group when she was 18, i.e. old enough that they couldn’t force her to stay.

It has taken decades of therapy and hard work to overcome the intense feelings of shame and fear of damnation that she said marked her childhood. The Christian faith group, based in South Bend, Indiana, dominated every aspect of her early life, she said.

There. That’s why. Those feelings are poison, and it’s evil (and if you like “sinful”) to force them on helpless children whose brains aren’t yet developed enough to resist adult indoctrination.

And one of the adherents of that nasty cult is the nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’s such a profound, searching insult.

Democrats have already stated that neither Barrett’s Catholic faith nor her membership in the People of Praise – which has never publicly been discussed or disclosed, but has been examined in press reports – will be raised in their questioning of the nominee.

But it should be. It absolutely should be.

It should be but it won’t be because we have this squeamishness about questioning religions, plus we know Republicans will play the “they hate God!!!” card for all it’s worth.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader who is seeking to confirm Barrett before the end of October, has nevertheless said that media reports and some remarks by senators about a newly discovered public statement by Barrett in opposition to Roe v Wade, were “disgusting attacks” on faith. He said they risked a return to the “tropes of the 1960s”, when it was feared by some anti-Catholic bigots that John F Kennedy would act in the interest of the pope instead of the US.

Like that.

It’s not mere “bigotry” to worry about the role of Catholicism in a nominee’s thinking. Some people can rigidly separate their religion from their work, but others can’t. We shouldn’t just assume that everyone can and will, nor should we necessarily take their word for it that they will.

But Powers, who is one of a handful of former People of Praise members who contacted the Guardian to describe their difficult experience in the group (using her married name), and some religious scholars who have studied charismatic Christian communities, say Barrett’s membership in this specific religious community does raise legitimate questions. They want to examine how views that are integral to the group’s core beliefs – from its treatment of women to the separation of church and state – might influence her. They are also distinct from most mainstream Catholic faith.

Of course her membership raises questions, and so does the more common or garden membership in a religion. “Ordinary” Catholicism adamantly opposes abortion; we get to question that.

“We were Catholic, but the Catholicism was on the side. Our life, all of our friends, all of the randoms who were living in our household, were the [People of Praise] community. It was God,” she said. “The brainwashing and the groupthink, the female subjugation of being there to serve and listen to your spiritual head. It was so devaluing. To me, it instilled such problems.”

…

Thomas Csordas, an anthropology professor at the University of California San Diego who has studied the issues around communities like People of Praise, said it was wrong to focus attention on whether the group could be a considered a “cult” in the spirit of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple. It was much more appropriate, he said, to examine what he called the “intentional community” of People of Praise and its nature of being “conservative, authoritarian, hierarchical, and patriarchal”.

Those qualities all march together. They’re bad qualities.

Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University, said that even if senators declined to question Barrett about her faith, the issues deserved to be aired in other forums because groups like People of Praise, he said, does reject a secular view of separation between church and state.

“I don’t think we should put her Catholicism on trial, but the Catholic conservative legal movement is putting liberalism on trial. They want to change a certain understanding of the liberal order of individual rights, and that is coming from the religious worldview of Catholic groups,” he said.

The religious worldview which is also a political worldview. They’re far from apolitical. It’s Francoism updated.

Trump will be far away from the crowd.

The White House communications director, Alyssa Farah, says that today’s address from Donald Trump will be short and to the point. Although, as many of you will have noticed, brevity is not exactly the president’s strong point.

Neither is getting to the or making a point. There is no point, there’s only a surging mephitic sea of exclamations.

“The President’s at a great distance, he’s gonna be up on the balcony and very briefly address the supporters there,” Farah told reporters at the White House on Saturday.

But “the supporters” will be in a crowd. See the problem there?

If reports that 2,000 people have been invited to watch the president’s address are true, that seems a large crowd – and a lot of Covid-19 risk – for a few words on law and order.

Quite so. Now if it were 30, and they were all widely spaced, it might not be so bad, but otherwise…it’s a very bad idea.

In the blizzard yesterday I missed this one:

Oh did he.

Yes he did.

The Girl Bot tweet is from 2018 but sure whatever.

Max Boot elaborates:

Trump’s henchman Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe is trying to further this mendacious narrative by declassifying selective snippets of intelligence — including suspected Russian disinformation. These “revelations” are then breathlessly hyped by Fox News as if they were Watergate II and robotically repeated by Mike Pence in the vice-presidential debate.

The problem is that this makes no sense to anyone who — unlike the president — doesn’t spend all day binge-watching Fox “News.” And those viewers are already voting for him.

The Fox addicts are a lock; the sane people not so much.

Lindsey Graham refuses to get a COVID test before he debates Jaime Harrison. Now why would he do that? Because he has it or suspects he has it?

A debate between incumbent Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and his Democratic challenger, Jamie Harrison, scheduled for Friday night was cancelled after Harrison demanded both candidates be tested for Covid-19 before the debate and Graham refused, leading the organizers to replace it with separate televised interviews.

Why refuse? Remember when people couldn’t get a test? Why would anyone refuse?

Last week, Graham said he tested negative for the coronavirus after President Donald Trump announced his Covid-19 diagnosis. Three senators, two of whom are on the Judiciary Committee, which Graham chairs, have tested positive for the coronavirus. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) were both at the Rose Garden ceremony for the nomination for Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Several other members of Congress, members of the administration and top military officers have since tested positive or decided to self-quarantine.

But Graham refuses to get a test. Huh.

Aw Don wanted to go out and play again but it seems that being hospitalized with the covid just a few days ago means you can’t do that immediately.

President Donald Trump will remain at the White House this weekend, people familiar with the matter said, after he said he wanted to hold rallies in Florida and Pennsylvania despite questions over the stage of his recovery from Covid-19.

Covid shmovid; he wants to play.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump “will be clear to go” on Saturday, when “he wants to talk to the American people.” There are medical tests underway to ensure he doesn’t transmit the virus when he returns to the campaign trail, she said on Fox News, adding that she’d conferred with White House doctor Sean Conley.

Who can’t be trusted. White House doctor Sean Conley has been refusing to answer some questions and giving implausible answers to others; he can’t be trusted.

Trump’s filling the void of not hitting the campaign trail by doing a series of lengthy interviews with conservative talk shows. He spent two hours in a radio interview with Rush Limbaugh on Friday afternoon. The president’s campaign billed it as “the largest virtual rally in radio history.”

So, as always, Trump does little or no actual work, but instead spends his time either tweeting or talking bullshit.

The president is later scheduled to appear on conservative radio host Mark Levin’s show and later Tucker Carlson’s Fox News television show.

So, that’s happy happy, but he loves having a crowd all around him screaming approval. He misses that.

Trump blathered at Rush Limbaugh for a few hours just now, because obviously he has nothing more important to do.

Towards the end of the radio broadcast, Limbaugh remarked that the president’s stamina was proof he had recovered from the coronavirus.

“The president’s status with COVID-19 is pretty solid,” Limbaugh declared, adding: “Not once during the hour and 42 minutes has the president been stumped, has he not known what he’s wanted to say.”

Oh please. Trump always knows what he wants to say, which is it doesn’t matter what, because the point is to prevent others from talking. We’ve watched him do it a million times in those “press briefings” – the way he holds out his pudgy little hand like a traffic cop when a reporter tries to get him to answer the actual question instead of bullshitting. He’s never at a loss for words, because he’s perfectly happy to say the same thing three times.

Informed of an Axios report that that the DOJ investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation would not be released before the November election, Trump expressed shock and frustration.

“It’s a disgrace,” he said. “If Bill Barr made that statement, I would be very disappointed in him.”

Right? Bill Barr is supposed to be in his pocket. What the hell, man?

Trump also had some choice words for Iran:

Steroids make you say “fuck” on the raydeeoh.