What is contrition, what is apology, what do we mean when we use those words?

Did Ted Yoho apologize and/or “offer contrition” to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for calling her a fucking bitch?

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s outrage over a Republican lawmaker’s verbal assault broadened into an extraordinary moment on the House floor on Thursday as she and other Democrats assailed a sexist culture of “accepting violence and violent language against women” whose adherents include Donald Trump.

A day after rejecting an offer of contrition from Republican congressman Ted Yoho for his language during this week’s Capitol steps confrontation, Ocasio-Cortez and more than a dozen colleagues cast the incident as all-too-common behavior by men, including the president and other Republicans.

An offer of contrition? What offer of contrition? There wasn’t one. Let’s review:

“I rise to apologize for the abrupt manner of the conversation I had with my colleague from New York,” Yoho said Wednesday morning, while also denying that he ever directed profane language toward Ocasio-Cortez.

…

Yoho, who was emotional during his brief soliloquy Wednesday morning on the House floor, stated, “the offensive name-calling — words attributed to me by the press, were never spoken to my colleague, and if they were construed that way I apologize for their misunderstanding,” before concluding, “I cannot apologize for my passion or for loving my god, my family and my country.” 

That’s not an offer of contrition, or an apology. Apologizing for “the abrupt manner of the conversation” is not apologizing for calling a woman a fucking bitch. Apologizing for other people’s misunderstanding is a minus-apology, an apology-remover.

Also: this is a pattern, and it’s a pattern the sitting president follows.

The remarkable outpouring, with several female lawmakers saying they had routinely encountered such treatment, came in an election year in which polls show women lean decisively against Trump, who has a history of mocking women. Trump was captured in a 2005 tape boasting about physically abusing them, and his disparagement of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has included calling her “crazy”.

And there are mountains more where that came from.

No Republicans spoke. But the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, at a separate appearance defended Yoho, 65, one of his party’s most conservative members and who will retire in January.

“When someone apologizes they should be forgiven,” McCarthy said. He added later: “I just think in a new world, in a new age, we now determine whether we accept when someone says I’m sorry if it’s a good enough apology.”

But he didn’t apologize. Apologizing for “the abrupt manner of the conversation” and not for the “fucking bitch” is not apologizing. Really. If I hit you in the head with a brick and also get mud on your shirt, it’s not an apology if I cite only the mud on the shirt. Yoho does not get to count that petulant whiny belittling irrelevance as an apology and neither does McCarthy. Also it’s not always the case that “when someone apologizes they should be forgiven.” It depends. Say someone kills your family and burns down your house and then says “sorry”; does that make forgiveness mandatory? I think not.

Our new friend Zack just keeps on giving. Thanks to the vagaries of Twitter I didn’t see this one yesterday, despite clicking on all the view threads and replies I did see.

It’s breathtaking, isn’t it. We impudent women “can,” according to this man, “believe” (stupid credulous creatures that we are) that our biology is “part of” what makes us women – only “part of,” mind you, we’re not allowed to “believe” it’s the whole of it. Also we’re not allowed to “believe” it’s what makes women women, we’re only allowed to believe it of our single selves, “personally.” He misused the “inclusive” their/them, and sowed confusion by doing so – he meant “a cisgender woman can believe her biology is part of what makes her, personally, a woman” – but she is required to believe that other rules apply to other women.

But wait! Not only is it a mere belief, not only is even that a mere part of what makes her a woman in her silly personal belief, but also – she is not allowed to “assert that this is the only way one can be defined as a woman.”

So many rules and limitations and orders in one little tweet, all telling women what a man will allow us to believe and assert.

That takes some fucking brass neck, I must say.

I’m not the only one.

There are a lot of replies like that – aka it’s a dogpile, and we’re told and told and told not to contribute to Twitter dogpiles – but what can we do when a conceited smug man who thinks he knows it all makes assertions about what women can believe, personally, about what makes us women, but cannot assert such beliefs about other women? What can we do when a smug conceited man says all that to a man and entirely ignores all the women who object to his domineering pronouncements about us? When the smug conceited smug man in question is a senior correspondent at Vox? He’s not a random Twitter fella, he’s an opinion-maker, and he won’t even reply to a single one of us.

Yes so when I saw that tweet just now and my hair caught fire I contributed to the dog pile. One more reply for him to ignore.

Right???

Funny how that works.

Notice Beauchamp’s “come on, man” – no pause to ask what is a man, no worries about whether men think having a male body makes men “more legitimately” men – just the bare word itself, taken for granted, as usual, as it always will be.

Media historian Aniko Bodroghkozy explains why the march on Selma got so much national attention.

On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers beat and gassed John Lewis and hundreds of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

…

Most Americans didn’t see the footage on the 6:30 nightly news. Instead, they saw it later Sunday night, which, like today, drew the biggest audiences of the week. That evening, ABC was premiering the first TV airing of “Judgment at Nuremberg.” An estimated 48 million people tuned in to watch the Academy Award-winning film, which dealt with the moral culpability of those who had participated in the Holocaust.

…

News programs never got those kinds of ratings. But shortly after the movie started, ABC’s news division decided to interrupt the movie with a special report from Selma.

…

[U]ntil Bloody Sunday, nothing had emerged out of Selma that gripped the nation’s attention. Even the Birmingham images didn’t have quite the immediate impact of those from Selma.

That’s largely because the special report interrupted a prime-time broadcast. But there was also the fact that the footage from Selma thematically complemented “Judgment at Nuremberg.”

Now that’s interesting. Perhaps people thought “Are we being like the Germans who did nothing? Should we be doing something?”

“I have just witnessed on television the new sequel to Adolf Hitler’s brown shirts,” one anguished young Alabamian from Auburn wrote to The Birmingham News. “They were George Wallace’s blue shirts. The scene in Alabama looked like scenes on old newsreels of Germany in the 1930s.”

In the ensuing days, hundreds of Americans jumped into planes, buses and automobiles to get to Selma and stand with the brutalized marchers. The landmark Voting Rights Act passed with remarkable speed, just five months after Bloody Sunday.

And the Supreme Court cut its head off in 2013.

In 2013, the Supreme Court eviscerated a key provision of the VRA. Section 5 of the law required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain approval before changing voting rules. This process, known as “preclearance,” blocked discrimination before it occurred. In Shelby County v. Holder, the court invalidated Section 4 — which determines the states and localities covered by Section 5 — ruling Congress must pass a new formula to determine which states and localities would be subject to “preclearance.” The ruling had the effect of eliminating preclearance, ushering in a wave of efforts in states previously covered under Section 5 to restrict voting rights.

I guess the Nuremberg effect fades after a few decades.

This Zack Beauchamp guy – he’s a senior correspondent at Vox. He wrote a long piece on the Harper’s letter and cancel culture and all that. In that context he talked about The Trans Question – aka won’t someone please think of the trans ladies.

Kate Manne and Jason Stanley, philosophers at Cornell and Yale, respectively, put the point nicely in an essay on the free speech debate in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Kate Manne and Jason Stanley are both very hostile to feminist women who say that women are women and men are not.

“When oppressed people speak out — and up, toward those in power — their right to speak may be granted, yet their capacity to know of what they speak doubted as the result of ingrained prejudice. And the way in which they express themselves is often then made the focus of the discussion,” they write. “So it is not just that these people have to raise their voices in order to be audible; it’s also that, when their tone becomes the issue, their speech is essentially being heard as mere noise, disruption, commotion. Their freedom of speech is radically undercut by what is aptly known as ‘tone policing.’”

Zack Beauchamp comments:

We saw this at work in the backlash to the Harper’s letter. Much of the controversy surrounded the decision to include a signature from J.K. Rowling, who has emerged as one of the most visible anti-trans figures in our culture. Rowling sees the backlash to her statements about trans people as a threat to her right to free expression; “as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech,” as she put it.

Already we’re in the muck. Rowling is not “anti-trans.” Disputing a new (and stupid) ideology that claims

1. men are women if they say they are and

2. it’s phobic and right-wing and evil to say that’s nonsensical

is labeled “anti-trans” or “transphobic” or TERF bigotry or all those. But the claim is nonsensical and it shouldn’t be framed as evil or murderous or violent to say so…but Zack Beauchamp does just that by labeling Rowling “anti-trans.”

But for a lot of trans writers and thinkers, having to constantly debate Rowling’s position— that the movement for trans equality is a threat to the safety and status of cisgender women — is a mechanism for excluding them from public discourse.

Hello Mr Beauchamp. I’m a woman. Are you aware that women are often excluded from public discourse? And have been as far back as we have any records? Does it occur to you at all, ever, that passionately defending men who say they are women, while slandering women who say that men are not women, is also a mechanism for excluding them – women – from public discourse? Does it occur to you at all, ever, that it’s not actually your place to be telling women that we’re just a fraction of the category women and that we have to “include” men in that category if they tell us to? Does it occur to you that you yourself are “punching down” by doing that? Because it sure as fuck occurs to us.

It is so hurtful to be told you aren’t “really” a woman or a man, to subject yourself to the public abuse and threats that inevitably follow when debating anti-trans voices, that the psychological cost effectively forces trans thinkers to self-censor.

How hurtful is “so” hurtful? How do you know? How do you measure it? Do you ever wonder how “hurtful” it is for women to be told to shut up and move over to make room for men who say they are women? Do you think about women (as thinking beings like you) at all?

Contrary to the notion that worries about safety are absurd, LGBTQ writers and writers of color commonly do experience threats of violence for participating in public debate.

You know who else experiences that? Women. We experience it a lot.

Allowing Rowling to speculate about which women should really “count,” in their view, contributes to crowding them out of the public sphere.

It’s not speculation though, it’s just material reality. And what about the way they – and you, by writing dreck like this – contribute to crowding us out of the public sphere?

[T]here are precious few trans people in positions of power and influence, and treating Rowling’s view as an odious-but-worth-debating view makes it less likely that trans people feel comfortable existing in the public eye. Why should trans people have to treat anti-trans voices as legitimate argumentative partners when no one would, for instance, expect a Jewish writer (like me) to debate a neo-Nazi?

But trans people are not equivalent to Jews, or to black people, or to the working class, or to immigrants, or to refugees, or to women. Also, women who refuse to agree that men are women if they say they are are not equivalent to neo-Nazis. Not even close.

I’m so sick of these smug shits.

Ummm…

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has insisted that a cognitive test he took recently was “difficult”, using the example of a question in which the patient is asked to remember and repeat five words.

“Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” Trump explained, saying that listing the words in order was worth “extra points”, and that he found the task easy.

He said it to a man-person standing in front of him, facing a camera for a tv shoot. I don’t know if there was a woman within view – he may have come up with that one all by himself. “Man” and “person” are pretty broad hints though.

“They said nobody gets it in order, it’s actually not that easy. But for me it was easy. And that’s not an easy question,” he told Fox News medical analyst and New York University professor of medicine Marc K Siegel.

Um. Yes it is. Even if you can’t see any of the five words it’s an easy question. It’s a dementia test, not a college entrance exam.

But for the full effect you have to watch the clip. Oh god oh god oh god.

Especially the part toward the end where he says they gotta test Joebiden, they gotta, he’s gotta deal with RUSSHA, there’s something going on there.

Trump went on to explain the test, saying that after several questions, the doctor returned to the list of words, asking Trump to repeat them. “And you go, ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ They say, ‘That’s amazing. How did you do that?’ ‘I do it because I have like a good memory? Because I’m cognitively there.’”

They don’t. They don’t say that. They don’t say “that’s amazing.” They don’t say that because it’s not amazing. And that’s for a real test, not one that names 5 (or 4) items a few inches in front of Trump’s face. It’s not amazing to be able to recall 5 words. It’s neutral. The inability to do so is a sign of impairment.

Also, Trump hesitated even over the list of things in front of his face.

NOW can we invoke the 25th????

New development! Michael Cohen ordered released from prison.

A judge ordered the release from prison of President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer on Thursday, saying he believes the government retaliated against him for planning to release a book about Trump before November’s election.

Michael Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was ordered back to prison on July 9 after probation authorities said he refused to sign a form banning him from publishing the book or communicating publicly in other manners, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said during a telephone conference.

The judge ordered him released by tomorrow afternoon.

“How can I take any other inference than that it’s retaliatory?” Hellerstein asked prosecutors, who insisted in court papers and again Thursday that Probation Department officers did not know about the book when they wrote a provision of home confinement that severely restricted Cohen’s public communications.

“I’ve never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people and looking at terms of supervised release,” the judge said. “Why would the Bureau of Prisons ask for something like this … unless there was a retaliatory purpose?”

Oh so it’s not routine. I vaguely assumed it was, or might be.

His attorney, Danya Perry, said in a statement that the order was “a victory for the First Amendment” and showed that the government cannot block a book critical of the president as a condition of release to home confinement.

Also a victory for the whole idea that we need all the information about Trump’s crimes, because of the position he holds, which gives him the power to drag the country into a sewer of corruption and mass death.

Dude explains that it’s bigotry for women to think that women are people with female bodies.

What a good thing it’s up to Zack Beauchamp to decide. We women are too stupid and too bigoted to decide or understand what women are.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has responded to Yoho’s “I won’t apologize” yesterday.

“And I want to be clear that representative Yoho’s comments were not deeply hurtful or piercing to me,” she added. “Because I have worked a working-class job. I have waited tables and I have ridden the subway. I have walked the streets in New York City. And this kind of language is not new. I have encountered words uttered by Mr. Yoho and men uttering the same words as Mr. Yoho while I was being harassed in restaurants. I have tossed men out of bars that have used language like Mr. Yoho’s.”

In other words he talked to her the way drunk assholes in bars have talked to her. Not what women should have to expect from colleagues (or anyone else, including drunks in bars).

Ocasio-Cortez, who said Wednesday that Yoho’s remarks did not amount to an apology, said Thursday he went to the House floor to “make excuses for his behavior.”

“And that I could not let go. I could not allow my nieces, I could not allow the little girls I go home to, I could not allow victims of verbal abuse and worse to see that, to see that excuse and to see our Congress accept it as legitimate,” she said. “And to accept it as an apology. And to accept silence as a form of acceptance, I could not allow that to stand.”

…

“Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters,” she said. “I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter, too. My father, thankfully, is not alive to see how Mr. Yoho treated his daughter. My mother got to see Mr. Yoho’s disrespect on the floor of this House towards me on television, and I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.”

The exchange between Yoho and Ocasio-Cortez was first reported by The Hill, which said Yoho called Ocasio-Cortez “disgusting” for suggesting unemployment and poverty were leading to a rise in crime in New York City.

“You are out of your freaking mind,” Yoho told Ocasio-Cortez, who then told him that he was “rude,” The Hill wrote, adding that the conversation was overheard by a reporter and that Yoho said “f—ing bitch” as he walked away. In a statement to NBC News, a Yoho spokesman denied that he used the slur.

The spokesman wasn’t there; why should we believe the spokesman?

Pelosi pointed out that it’s what women face, and it shouldn’t be.

“It’s a manifestation of attitudes in our society really, I can tell you that firsthand, they’ve called me names for at least at least 20 years of leadership, 18 years of leadership,” she said. “There’s no limit to the disrespect or the lack of acknowledgement of the strength of women and nothing brings more, nothing is more wholesome for our government for our politics for our country than the increased participation of women and women will be treated with respect.”

Step one: don’t call us fucking bitches.

It’s official.

Canada’s federal court has ruled that an asylum agreement the country has with the US is invalid because America violates the human rights of refugees.

The Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), in place since 2004, requires refugee claimants to request protection in the first safe country they reach.

But on Wednesday, a judge declared the deal unconstitutional due to the chance that the US will imprison the migrants.

In other words refugees who tried to go from the US to Canada were being turned back at the border on the grounds that they were already in that “first safe country.” Lawyers for refugees pointed out that what they were already in was not safe.

Nedira Jemal Mustefa, one of the refugees forced to remain in the US, told the court her time in US solitary confinement was “a terrifying, isolating and psychologically traumatic experience,” according to the court ruling.

“We’re all too familiar with the treatment that the US metes out to asylum seekers,” Maureen Silcoff, president of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, told Reuters news agency.

It’s shameful. Being a refugee is not a crime.

Federal court judge Ann Marie McDonald ruled that the deal was in violation of a section of Canada’s Charter of Rights that bans the government from interfering in the right to life, liberty and security.

“It is my conclusion, based upon the evidence, that ineligible STCA claimants are returned to the US by Canadian officials where they are immediately and automatically imprisoned by US authorities,” Judge McDonald said in her ruling.

“I have concluded that imprisonment and the attendant consequences are inconsistent with the spirit and objective of the STCA and are a violation of the rights guaranteed by section 7 of the [Charter of Rights and Freedoms],” she continued.

All thanks to the crime boss from Queens.

Behold the violent anarchists!

A new ad for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign used an image of pro-democracy protests in Ukraine from 2014 to show what it called “chaos & violence” in the US.

The ad, published on Tuesday, includes a photo of the president listening to police leaders next to another photo appearing to show a group of protesters attacking a police officer on the ground.

“Public safety vs chaos & violence,” the text underneath the photos says.

The photographer, Mstyslav Chernov, confirmed to Business Insider that this was his photo from Ukraine in 2014.

You remember Ukriane. It’s the country Trump tried to muscle into helping him pin dirt on Biden.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

From Pliny:

Click to embiggen.

Trump’s ambassador to the UK is also being investigated for saying sexist and racist shit. What a surprise.

Diplomats told investigators that Johnson made remarks — often casually bandied about — that they found deeply offensive and demoralizing, sources said.

In 2018, ahead of an event for Black History Month — commonly marked at US embassies around the world — Johnson appeared agitated and asked if the audience would be “a whole bunch of Black people,” according to one source.

Three sources said Johnson questioned why the Black community would want a separate month to celebrate Black history and argued that Black fathers didn’t remain with their families and that was the “real challenge.” One source said an official who heard the remarks was “stunned” and that the incident was documented and made known to both the OIG inspectors and a supervisor.

…

Four sources familiar with Johnson’s meetings told CNN the ambassador hosted official gatherings at a posh men’s-only club in London, the centuries-old, exclusive White’s. Eventually Johnson was told by another diplomat at the embassy in late 2018 that he had to stop holding those meetings, three of the sources said. None of the embassy’s female diplomats would have been able to attend.

Three sources said Johnson has described women in offensive and diminishing ways.

According to one source, at certain public events, Johnson would start his remarks by quipping about how many pretty women were present — reducing them to decorative objects in a way a source described as “just sort of cringeworthy.”

If you want somebody to explain to you why that kind of thing is cringeworthy, especially at work, there are plenty of us who can do that.

Two sources said the ambassador indicated he preferred working with women, but he suggested that was because women were cheaper and worked harder than men.

Hey, the same is true of slaves.

Those sources said that it was a struggle to get Johnson on board with an event for International Women’s Day, which is also widely commemorated at embassies worldwide. One source said he asked why he had to do “a feminist event.” However, that event did end up taking place.

A team at the embassy tried to get Johnson to do an event around gender-based violence in November 2017, this source said, to which the ambassador replied that he was not interested because he’s “not a woman.”

Ah yes, sir, but some people are.

Johnson’s way of operating and the language he used reflected the President’s deep distrust of the bureaucracy that supports the executive branch and serves administrations of both parties.

In other words Trump distrusts the professionals who know what they’re doing, and loves rich guys who know nothing and talk belittling crap about people they see as underlings. Awesome.

Johnson would say the embassy needed more Republicans in senior positions and described staff there as members of a so-called “Deep State,” one of the sources said.

Lukens, a career diplomat who served as the ambassador’s deputy chief of mission, told GQ Magazine in 2019 that after he praised former President Barack Obama for managing a delicate issue in the US relationship with Senegal in remarks to British students in the fall of 2018, Johnson summarily dismissed him.

Johnson accused Lukens of being “a traitor” because of the speech, two sources said, and his ouster was a hit on embassy morale.

He sounds like a real horror.

Biden thinks Trump is the first racist president.

Dude.

“We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has,” Trump’s Democratic challenger said, the Washington Post reports.

No he’s not.

The “peculiar institution” loomed large over the first few decades of American presidential history. Not only did enslaved laborers help build the White House all of the earliest presidents (except for John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams) owned enslaved people. George Washington kept some 300 bondsmen at his Mount Vernon plantation. Thomas Jefferson—despite once calling slavery an “assemblage of horrors”—owned at least 175 enslaved workers at one time. James Madison, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson each kept several dozen enslaved workers, and Martin Van Buren owned one during his early career.

William Henry Harrison owned several inherited enslaved people before becoming president in 1841, while John Tyler and James K. Polk were both enslavers during their stints in office. Zachary Taylor, who served from 1849-1850, was the last chief executive to keep enslaved people while living in the White House. He owned some 150 enslaved workers on plantations in Kentucky, Mississippi and Louisiana.

And then there were the racists who didn’t own slaves.

I think it’s fair to say Trump is by far the most overt and explicit racist we’ve had in many years, but the only? Please.

Jane Clare Jones nailing things down:

This argument is not, therefore, an appeal for empathy with the damage done to us by male power and projection, by the immemorial and immovable demand that we efface ourselves before the needs of more important others. We know our pain doesn’t count in your economy, that it only registers on your balance books as a sly deceptive weapon or a vicious wilful harm to the interests of the only kind of people given credit. That you’re so certain of the justness of your accounting, you never seem to notice, that this one obvious fact, gives the lie to the ‘validity’ of your catechism. If you really thought that they were women, their pain would be a nought to you as well.

If you really thought that they were women, you would ignore them and talk over them, at best, just as you do us. If you really thought that they were women, you would bully and threaten them as you do us. If you really thought that they were women, you would unleash violence against them, at worst, just as you do us.

In response to your demands, for our existence and its words, all we’ve said is ‘no.’ We haven’t threatened, or intimidated, or besieged, or tried to cancel. We’ve explained, millions of times, why we’re saying no, why we won’t let you take our words, because we need them. But the economy of entitlement that belies all your claims to gender non-conformity, will not respect our boundary. The boundaries here are literal, around our spaces, around the de-lineation of our words, but they are, above all, figurative. They arise from the expression of our own subjectivity. The naming of our needs and interests. They arise when we say ‘no,’ and ‘I don’t want,’ and ‘you can’t have.’ In an ethical economy it should be understood that the demand ‘I want to take’ never, between adults, has right of force over ‘I don’t want to give.’ You do not take from others what is not given freely, you don’t coerce them into giving things they do not want to give. Doing so is an act of narcissistic domination. It subordinates an-other’s needs and interests entirely to your own, and in so doing, annihilates their subjectivity. In its core, this is the logic, and the deep traumatic injury, of rape.

Women have a right to say no.

Trump did a coronavirus briefing yesterday.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, thank you very much, and good afternoon.  Today, I want to provide an update on our response to the China virus and what my administration is doing to get the outbreak in the Sun Belt under control.  It seems largely in Sun Belt but could be spreading.

First sentence in and he goes with “China virus.” We should start calling him the Queens virus.

He says they’re all very sad about the virus.

My administration will stop at nothing to save lives and shield the vulnerable, which is so important. 

Oh? That will make a change. They’ve stopped at a fuck of a lot of thing up to now. They’ve stopped at wearing masks, telling people to wear masks, not holding rallies, taking advice from Fauci, helping Fauci inform the public, testing, masks, locking down – and many more. They’ve stopped and stopped and stopped. Why should we believe they’re going to stop at nothing now?

The China virus is a vicious and dangerous illness, but we’ve learned a great deal about it and who it targets.  We are in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful.  We’ve developed them as we go along.  Some areas of our country are doing very well; others are doing less well.  It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better — something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is.  It’s the way — it’s what we have.  If you look over the world, it’s all over the world, and it tends to do that.

No, if you look over the world, you see that many other countries have done far better at holding the numbers down than we have. You see that we are among the worst.

He took a few questions. One that was not about any virus got a lot of attention.

Q    And my follow-up — my second question; it’s a little bit different topic, but it’s one that a lot of people are talking about.  Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison, and so a lot of people want to know if she’s going to turn in powerful people. And I know you’ve talked in the past about Prince Andrew, and you’ve criticized Bill Clinton’s behavior.  I’m wondering, do you feel that she’s going to turn in powerful men?  How do you see that working out?

THE PRESIDENT:  I don’t know.  I haven’t really been following it too much.  I just wish her well, frankly.  I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach and I guess they lived in Palm Beach.  But I wish her well, whatever it is.  I don’t know the situation with Prince Andrew.  I just don’t know.  I’m not aware of it.

The girls who were groomed into sex toys for Jeffrey Epstein and his buddies including Andy Windsor? Any thoughts on them?

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.