A couple of days ago a Republican congressional representative, John Yoho, called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “disgusting” to her face and then as he was walking away said aloud “fucking bitch.”

Today he staged a…what to call it…a resentful “explanation,” a weepy self-justification, a passive-aggressive attack claiming to be an apology.

AOC said that was not any kind of apology.

In his floor speech, Yoho apologized for the “the abrupt manner of the conversation I had with my colleague from New York,” but he denied calling Ocasio-Cortez “disgusting” and a “fucking bitch,” as the Hill reported.

The “abrupt manner”? Abrupt? Dude, shouty angry man calling woman names is not “abrupt.” It is, for a start, threatening. It’s aggressive, and male on female aggression is always threatening. You might even be able to figure out why if you think about it really hard.

“The offensive name-calling words attributed to me by the press were never spoken to my colleagues, and if they were construed that way, I apologize for their misunderstanding,” the Florida Republican said.

Ah ah ah no you don’t, you chickenshit. Where is the speaker who cause those words to be “spoken”? That speaker was you. You mean “I never spoke those words to my colleagues,” so say it that way. Did you omit the speaking agent because the lie feels too obvious that way?

He went on to describe how he is “passionate” about fighting for those experiencing poverty. “I cannot apologize for my passion or for loving my God, my family and my country,” Yoho said.

Who asked him to? Who asked him to apologize for loving his god or his family? How is that even relevant? He also had the bad taste to get all emo (or to pretend to get all emo) when he said them.

A bully and a chickenshit and a whiner.

Trump has been saying Biden wants to “abolish the suburbs” and Biden has been responding that that’s horseshit. (Possibly not his exact wording.)

Trump has largely focused on an Obama-era rule intended to combat historic racial discrimination in housing. The president has said he could be releasing his plan for replacing the rule any day now.

“Replacing” here means “reversing” or “nullifying.”

It’s another instance of Trump implicitly using race in his campaign pitch, which he’s also been doing explicitly on other issues. In this instance, the president appears to be using a policy to fight housing segregation in an attempt to scare white voters about outsiders coming into their neighborhoods. On Friday, he said that Democrats want to “eliminate single-family zoning, bringing who knows into your suburbs, so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down.”

Oh no, not who knows. What race is that exactly?

In making this pitch about the suburbs, Trump has been attacking an Obama-era regulation called the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which was meant to combat housing discrimination. 

Trump of course is all about housing discrimination. The Feds sued him over it back when he was starting out in the racist housing business.

Which homeowners is it not fair to? The whole point of it is to be fair to homeowners who have been shut out of the whole “build equity by buying a house” arrangement because the real estate business painted majority-black neighborhoods in red so that Smart Shoppers of the pasty persuasion would know not to buy there. The government did the same thing, designating some public housing Whites Only. Trump wants to hang onto all that as opposed to fixing it.

[The AFFH rule] tells jurisdictions that receive federal housing funds that they have to assess what patterns of housing discrimination they have and then come up with a plan to diminish them. It also provides a data-based tool for communities to use in doing this assessment.

The rule was implemented in 2015 under the 1968 Fair Housing Act, a federal law that says federal agencies have to administer any housing-related programs “in a manner affirmatively to further” fair housing. Advocates said that the rule at long last gave specificity and teeth to that provision.

…

In practice, that may well look like rezoning in some communities, according to Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

“When local communities are required to take a look at how segregation developed in their neighborhoods, most of them are going to find that it was local zoning that led to that purposeful, policy-driven segregation,” she said.

Those red areas on the real estate maps. They didn’t get there by accident, or by natural selection.

Mind you, he cut the rule’s hamstrings long ago.

The rule went into effect in 2015, but in January 2018, the Trump administration gutted it, telling cities they no longer had to use the tool (and that they had two more years to submit their assessments).

Pssst – black lives matter too. Sir.

In his rhetoric about this policy, Trump is saying that “a suburb is the kind of community where great Americans live because we’ve limited it,” said Lynn Vavreck, professor of politics and public policy at UCLA.

“I think it’s just straight-up racializing this idea of housing,” she said. “This is the kind of argument that Trump makes all the time: ‘I’m going to tell you that these people are good, or us versus them. We, the good people, and they, the bad people. And we have to keep them out to keep our greatness.'”

And we know how to tell them apart because of the handy color code installed in your brain.

Dana Milbank points out an inconsistency in Trump’s Lawnorder ideology:

Trump said Sunday that federal police have been mobilized in Portland, Ore., (against the wishes of state and local authorities) to “protect Federal property” from “anarchists and agitators” — two years after Trump pardoned two men serving sentences for arson that burned 139 acres of federal property in Oregon in a case that inspired armed militias to seize federal land.

Oh yes, that pardon for destroying that federal property. Remember that?

Over and over during a 41-day armed standoff that terrified many locals, leader Ammon Bundy listed his demands: hand ownership of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge over to local ranchers and free two men convicted of starting fires that spread to public land and imperiled the lives of firefighters. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump granted one of those wishes.

Trump pardoned Dwight Hammond, 76, and his son, Steven, 49, after U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican, championed their case in a June 29 phone call with the president. Walden has long been a supporter of the Hammonds. During the 2016 standoff, Walden gave an impassioned speech in support of the Bundys’ cause.

“How do you have faith in a government that doesn’t ever listen to you?” Walden asked on the floor of the U.S. House. “To my friends across eastern Oregon, I will always fight for you. Hopefully the country, through this, understands we have a real problem in America, with how we manage our lands and how we are losing them.”

Who’s “we”? Whose is the “our”? What Walden is talking about is removing land from federal protection to hand it over to ranchers for $000,000,000. Free cattle food for ranchers, loss of wildlife refuges and parks and monuments for the rest of us.

Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities said Tuesday that President Trump “has once again sided with lawless extremists who believe that public land does not belong to all Americans.”

The extremists are extremists both in thinking public land should be used for their personal profit and for using illegal and sometimes violent means to make their point. But Trump pardons them and brutalizes anti-racist protesters.

It’s good to know where we are.

Trump tried to get the fat cat he made ambassador to the UK to muscle the UK government to muscle the British Open to spend its money at Trump’s golf resort. That’s a lot of levels of trying to muscle people to send money his way for a vulgarian from Queens.

The American ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, told multiple colleagues in February 2018 that President Trump had asked him to see if the British government could help steer the world-famous and lucrative British Open golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, according to three people with knowledge of the episode.

Why would the British government want to do anything so corrupt and sleazy and trashy? They’re not the boss of the British Open, and Turnberry is a Trump racket, so…why would they consider that for a second? It’s ludicrous. And if they did, of course, the British Open would tell them to get stuffed. And they know it would. The whole thing is moronic as well as filthy…but the filth is very filthy.

The ambassador’s deputy, Lewis A. Lukens, advised him not to do it, warning that it would be an unethical use of the presidency for private gain, these people said. But Mr. Johnson apparently felt pressured to try.

Filth. Trump is filth.

Lukens was not happy about the filth.

Mr. Lukens, who served as the acting ambassador before Mr. Johnson arrived in November 2017, emailed officials at the State Department to tell them what had happened, colleagues said. A few months later, Mr. Johnson forced out Mr. Lukens, a career diplomat who had earlier served as ambassador to Senegal, shortly before his term was to end.

That’ll teach him! We can’t have honest people in Trump’s administration; it would be unseemly.

Beyond the legal and ethical red flags, asking for such a favor from his host country would put Mr. Johnson in an untenable position as the emissary of the United States.

“It is diplomatic malpractice because once you do that, you put yourself in a compromised position,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as President Barack Obama’s special counsel for ethics and later as his ambassador to the Czech Republic. “They can always say, ‘Remember that time when you made that suggestion.’ No experienced diplomat would do that.”

I would hope even an inexperienced one would see how gruesomely wrong it would be. Ambassadors aren’t there to funnel money to crooked presidents; that’s not what ambassadoring is for.

Trump likes the fascist suppression of protests so much that he’s doing more of it.

Homeland Security officials said Monday they are making preparations to deploy federal agents to Chicago, while President Trump threatened to send U.S. law enforcement personnel to other Democratic-led cities experiencing spates of crime.

It’s up to governors to get medical supplies during a pandemic, but it’s up to the feds to police selected cities (the ones with too many black people and too many people who vote for the Democrats).

Trump made the pronouncement as he defended his administration’s use of force in Portland, Ore., where agents have clashed nightly with protesters and made arrests from unmarked cars. Calling the unrest there “worse than Afghanistan,” Trump’s rhetoric escalated tensions with Democratic mayors and governors who have criticized the presence of federal agents on U.S. streets, telling reporters at the White House that he would send forces into jurisdictions with or without the cooperation of their elected leaders.

Worse than Afghanistan ffs. Oh and by the way Mister Sir, since we’re on the subject, what about those bounties?

“We’re looking at Chicago, too. We’re looking at New York,” he said. “All run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by the radical left.”

Ya gonna firebomb them? Nuke them? Put lead in the water?

Three Department of Homeland Security officials said Monday that the agency has been making preparations to deploy agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Chicago, but the officials said operational details are not yet finalized.

Immigration agents are being deployed to Chicago to attack citizens protesting racial injustice. That’s where we are.

This is so infuriating.

Oh no, she’s too exact! She’s too good at talking about what she’s talking about and not something else! (Flowers? Babies? Baby flowers?) She’s too competent! Ewwwwwwwwwww. Women like that are gross, and we’re suspicious of them, because they might just find something better to do than flatter and placate us. In short they’re bitches.

When men do anger at work they’re seen as authoritative and in control; when women do anger at work they’re seen as bitches and ballbusters.

It would be nice if male news personalities didn’t casually endorse that double standard.

Well, he denies it, but the reporter says he heard it, and another Rep doesn’t deny it but rather says he was thinking about other things.

Not really f*cking bitch but fucking bitch.

When a man says something like that to a woman…it sounds to her as if he’s longing to follow up with a punch. It doesn’t sound just mean or rude, it sounds threatening.

Trump just can’t catch a break. Chris Wallace of Fox News asked him at the end of his interview the other day how he sees his presidency.

“I think I was very unfairly treated,” Trump responded. “From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.”

Well…but…I mean…a presidency isn’t primarily about the mood of the president, it’s about bigger things. I don’t think Wallace was asking “has it been fun for you?”

Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man. He is so gripped by his grievances, such a prisoner of his resentments, that even the most benevolent question from an interviewer—what good parts of your presidency would you like to be remembered for?—triggered a gusher of discontent.

I’m not sure that’s because he’s deeply unhappy though. I’d love to think he is, but I don’t think his saying “I was very unfairly treated” is a sign of that. I think that’s more a sign of his grandiosity and self-focus than of misery. Deeply furious, yet, but deeply unhappy…I’m skeptical.

Such a disposition in almost anyone else—a teacher, a tax accountant, a CEO, a cab driver, a reality-television star—would be unfortunate enough. After all, people who obsess about being wronged are just plain unpleasant to be around: perpetually ungrateful, short-tempered, self-absorbed, never at peace, never at rest.

It’s the self-absorbed bit that really counts. Can you think of anything more boring to be absorbed by than the self of Donald Trump? But more seriously, it’s the complete indifference to everyone else. The solipsism. Imagine being self-absorbed and being Donald Trump – it would be like being absorbed by an old grapefruit rind or something.

The fact that he is devoid of any moral sensibilities or admirable human qualities—self-discipline, compassion, empathy, responsibility, courage, honesty, loyalty, prudence, temperance, a desire for justice—means he has no internal moral check; the question Is this the right thing to do? never enters his mind.

It also means he has nothing of interest to think about or care about, it means he lives in a desert of nothingness.

One senses in Donald Trump no joy, no delight, no laughter. All the emotions that drive him are negative. There is something repugnant about Trump, yes, but there is also something quite sad about the man. He is a damaged soul.

One doesn’t just “sense” it – it’s completely obvious. We know perfectly well there is no joy or laughter in Trump because he makes it extremely clear.

That was fun! Power went out here at 4:12 a.m. and stayed out for just over 7 hours.

On the plus side, I got to watch a couple of tree workers cut down a very tall dead evergreen tree in the next block. They cut off the branches from bottom to near the top, lowering the bigger ones on ropes and dropping the smaller ones. Then they cut off the tops, with a few small branches left, by tying them up then making two cuts then pushing. Then they repeat that process all the way back down the tree.

One of the two on this job is a woman. I’m impressed.

Action misogyny:

The man authorities have said attacked the family of a federal judge, leaving her husband wounded and her son dead, had previously called her “a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama,” and had fantasized about raping a different female judge who presided over his divorce case, NBC News reported.

A review of thousands of pages of self-published writing by Roy Den Hollander, an anti-feminist lawyer, found threats of retribution against the “feminazi infestation of government institutions” and the “feminist infested American judicial system,” NBC reported. The lawyer “was active in anti-feminist and misogynist groups on Facebook, including groups titled Humanity Vs. Feminism and Men Going Their Own Way, according to an analysis of accounts linked to him,” NBC News reported. It characterized his writing as “littered with language common among the most extreme anti-feminist communities on the web.”

Oh that’s exciting. I’ve been a target of some of those “communities on the web.” I think they’ve forgotten about me now, but it was creepy at the time. They were so obsessive about it.

I did wonder why they did the interview outside, in DC in July. I grew up in New Jersey, and summers there are steamy; DC is worse. It turns out it was Trump’s idea.

“Hot enough for you here, Mr President?” asked Chris Wallace.

“It’s hot,” said Trump. “It’s about, well, sort of almost record-breaking stuff.”

“You know, we wanted to do it inside,” replied Wallace. “This is your choice.”

Maybe he thinks outside looks good on him. It doesn’t. (Also, those chairs – he looked ridiculous on his chair, all bunched up.)

He claimed that people flying the confederate flag were “not talking about racism”. But when asked about removing the names of confederate generals from US military bases, Trump could only think about race. And some weird stuff about a couple of world wars.

“We’re going to name it after the Rev Al Sharpton? What are you going to name it, Chris? Tell me what you’re going to name it,” Trump sputtered.

No, they’re going to name it after Amos and Andy. Jesus christ.

Trump says hell yes he’s going to keep sending the feds in to trample on protesters’ rights.

Speaking in the Oval Office, the president brushed aside claims the officers are depriving people of their constitutional rights, and concerns such deployments could herald an attempt by Trump to rule without Congress.

Because he recognizes no legitimate limit on his power to do what he wants, because that’s who he is. It always has been.

In Portland, local media has stressed that the protests are not paralysing the city and are confined to a small area, and that much of life continues as normally as possible under the coronavirus pandemic.

Never you mind; it’s a pretext for Trump to bash heads and by god he’s going to bash heads.

On Monday, it was reported that agents were set to be sent to cities including Chicago. In the Oval Office, the president complained about cities including Chicago and his native New York.

“The police are afraid to do anything,” he said, though Portland police have reported some federal agents acting “under their own supervision and direction”, many while dressed in camouflage fatigues that make them look like regular troops.

Trump continued: “We’re not going to let New York and Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and all of these, Oakland in California is a mess, we’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”

Oakland. Huh. Not San Francisco, but Oakland. Why’s that?

Because like all the others he listed, it has a large black population. They’re all Great Migration destination cities, and Trump of course wants to kick the shit out of them for that reason.

“Nobody will have done what I’m doing in the next four weeks,” Trump told Fox News Sunday.

I think our verb tenses need a little work.

Describing actions against protesters which observers and officials have described as blatantly unconstitutional, Trump said: “No problem. They grab them, a lot of people in jail.

“These are leaders. These people are anarchists, they’re not protesters … These are people that hate our country and we’re not going to let it go forward.”

Yeah see that’s not how that works. He doesn’t get to just announce that they’re all “anarchists” (does anyone think he has the faintest idea what the word means?) and he’s going to send the feds to throw them all in jail.

That figures.

The Trump administration has been consulting the former government lawyer who wrote the legal justification for waterboarding on how the president might try to rule by decree.

John Yoo told the Guardian he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders on whether to apply existing federal laws.

Aka Trump’s view all along: he should be able to do whatever he wants.

Constitutional scholars and human rights activists have also pointed to the deployment of paramilitary federal forces against protesters in Portland as a sign that Trump is ready to use this broad interpretation of presidential powers as a means to suppress basic constitutional rights.

He’s always been ready; now he thinks he can get away with it.

There is nothing in Trump that tells him he shouldn’t do X. There’s a big empty space where that faculty should be.

Alka Pradhan, a defence counsel in the 9/11 terrorism cases against inmates in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, said: “John Yoo’s so-called reasoning has always been based on ‘What can the president get away with?’ rather than ‘What is the purpose and letter of the law?’

“That is not legal reasoning, it’s inherently tyrannical and anti-democratic.”

And that’s where we are.

Trump’s stormtroopers:

Pompeo the other day saw fit to bash the 1619 Project.

“The New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’—so named for the year that the first slaves were transported to America—wants you to believe that our country was founded for human bondage,” Pompeo said in his speech in Philadelphia on Thursday. “They want you to believe that America’s institutions continue to reflect the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding.”

And Pompeo wants you to think they don’t.

But they do. Of course they do. Policing, the prison system, the court systems (bail, plea deals, 3 strikes laws, harsh sentencing, capital punishment), schools, medical institutions, and on and on. Of course they do. We never rooted out the reflections of the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding and continuance of it for more than two centuries. Of course our institutions still reflect that.

“They want you to believe that Marxist ideology that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed. The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the New York Times spout this ideology,” he added. “This is a dark vision of America’s birth. I reject it. It’s a disturbed reading of history. It is a slander on our great people.”

He rejects it, does he. Easy for him. Of course it’s a dark vision of America’s birth, but that’s because it’s what happened. We as a people have been sweeping it under the rug all along and we really need to stop doing that. The white portion of America committed crimes against humanity in relation to the brown portion of America and it has still never paid reparations, never done anything like enough to compensate for the generations of harm. Instead we continue to treat brown people as either cheap labor for jobs like chicken processing (one of the worst jobs on earth) or criminals who must be stripped of all rights and locked in boxes for years. Pompeo is dead right that that’s a dark vision but it’s fucking well what happened and is still happening.

“The Secretary drew a sharp distinction between the view of the 1619 Project—that America was founded on repression—and his own view that America, uniquely, was founded on a then-new conception of universal unalienable human rights,” a State Department spokeswoman told Foreign Policy by email.

Ok but what about the repression part? The new conception of human rights was indeed a good thing, but most of the people men who came up with it didn’t even apply it in their own (cough) households. Most of them had slaves; none of them thought those rights applied to women. Pompeo’s “sharp distinction” works only if you think slaves and displaced indigenous people and women don’t matter.

“Secretary Pompeo is fully committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce representative of America’s devotion to the principle of equal opportunity. This commitment to diversity and inclusion reflects the Department’s professional ethos.”

Excuse me? Workforce? What about citizenry? Does Pompeo see us as just labor? He’s not the Secretary of Labor, he’s the Secretary of State (more’s the pity), why the hell is he referring to us as a workforce?

“Pompeo made it very clear where he stands and reaffirmed the purpose of the commission by denigrating the movement for equal justice and the call for racial reckoning and healing in America,” said one State Department official. “Everyone that I have spoken with is horrified and disgusted by the commission, his press conference, and [the] attack on 1619,” said the official.

…

“Everyone who works for Trump is under instructions to ramp up the culture war,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Foreign Policy in an interview. “I think Secretary Pompeo has been a loyal servant of Donald Trump for his entire tenure and he is following instructions.”

So I guess the instructions are to say that white people are the best and brown people deserved what they got.

Really? They can’t say what a woman is?

Not one of them answered the question.

Funny that the question wasn’t “What is a man?” I guess because that one’s easy, it’s just “woman” that can’t be defined?

I’d like to offer them some of my “attitude.”

Portland mayor to feds: gtfo.

The mayor of Portland in Oregon has renewed his call for federal troops to leave the US city, accusing them of abusive tactics against protesters.

“They are sharply escalating the situation,” Mayor Ted Wheeler told CNN on Sunday.

And they’re not invited. They’re imposed from above.

Sometimes that’s justified. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock when white mobs were attacking the nine students who were integrating the high school…but then the mayor had requested the troops. Kennedy sent troops to Oxford, Mississippi to quell riots meant to keep James Meredith out of the University (“Ole Miss”), over the governor’s objections.

It was a high-stakes showdown between President Kennedy and Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett. “I’m a Mississippi segregationist and I am proud of it,” the governor declared.

…

By Saturday, Sept. 29, 1962, Kennedy was deploying federal marshals to Oxford, and Barnett was making a fiery speech at an Ole Miss football game. “I love Mississippi! I love her people, our customs,” he said. “I love and I respect our heritage.”

Football and die-hard racism and male bravado; booya.

But this isn’t that. Trump isn’t sending the feds to protect black students from raging racist mobs; on the contrary; Trump is sending the feds to terrorize and mangle protesters who are protesting…racism. This is Little Rock turned inside out.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday, Mayor Wheeler said there were “dozens if not hundreds of federal troops” in the city, adding: “Their presence here is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism.

“They’re not wanted here. We haven’t asked them here. In fact, we want them to leave,” he said.

His comments echoed those of Oregon Governor Kate Brown, who described the presence of federal troops in the city as “purely political theatre” from the Donald Trump administration.

And the theater is theater of racism, theater of fascism – not that of We Shall Overcome or Eyes on the Prize or This Little Light of Mine.

Oregon is suing.

Oregon’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the federal government, accusing it of unlawfully detaining protesters.

In the lawsuit, Ellen Rosenblum requested a restraining order to stop agents from the Department of Homeland Security, US Marshals Service, US Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protection Service from making any more arrests in the city.

…

The lawsuit said the actions of federal officers violated protesters’ ability to exercise their constitutional First Amendment right to assembly and, by seizing and detaining people without a warrant, also breached the Fourth and Fifth Amendment right to due process.

Protesting is allowed. Protesters have rights. Trump is a literal fascist.

Via Wil Wheaton:

Sean Ingle in the Guardian:

World Rugby is considering banning trans women from playing women’s rugby because of significant safety concerns that have emerged following recent research, a decision that would make it the first international sports federation to go down that path.

You know, you’d think the significant safety concerns would have been there all along, given the differences between male and female bodies.

The Guardian can reveal that in a 38-page draft document produced by its transgender working group, it is acknowledged that there is likely to be “at least a 20-30% greater risk” of injury when a female player is tackled by someone who has gone through male puberty. The document also says the latest science shows that trans women retain “significant” physical advantages over biological women even after they take medication to lower their testosterone.

No shit.

As World Rugby’s working group notes, players who are assigned male at birth and whose puberty and development is influenced by androgens/testosterone “are stronger by 25%-50%, are 30% more powerful, 40% heavier, and about 15% faster than players who are assigned female at birth (who do not experience an androgen-influenced development).”

Sanity at last. Other sports please note.

On the one hand it’s funny, but on the other more serious hand it’s appalling.

No no no no no, says Trump, the last 5 questions are very hard, I bet you couldn’t answer them, I bet Biden couldn’t answer them.

Well one of them, says Wallace, is count backward from 100 by sevens.

No no no that’s misrepresentation, says Trump.

93… says Wallace.

Trump apparently thinks it was an IQ test as opposed to a cognitive test. Maybe one of the questions on the cognitive test should be “What’s the difference between an IQ test and a cognitive test?”