Trump is determined to hide what he’s doing with all that money.

The Trump administration’s intensifying efforts to block oversight of its coronavirus-related rescue programs are raising new alarms with government watchdogs and lawmakers from both parties amid concerns about the anonymity of companies receiving unprecedented levels of taxpayer funds.

Government watchdogs warned members of Congress last week that previously unknown Trump administration legal decisions could substantially block their ability to oversee more than $1 trillion in spending related to the coronavirus pandemic.

A TRILLION.

In a letter to four congressional committee chairs Thursday, two officials in charge of a new government watchdog entity revealed that the Trump administration had issued legal rulings curtailing independent oversight of Cares Act funding.

How does the Trump administration get to issue unilateral “legal rulings”? They’re not the Supreme Court. Can Trump issue a “legal ruling” that everyone in the country has to give him all their money and possessions?

The letter surfaced amid growing bipartisan outrage over the administration’s decision not to disclose how it is spending hundreds of billions in aid for businesses.

It’s pissing off even the Republicans, so it must be really bad.

According to the previously undisclosed letter, Treasury Department attorneys concluded that the administration is not required to provide the watchdogs with information about the beneficiaries of programs created by the Cares Act’s “Division A.” That section includes some of the most controversial and expensive programs in the coronavirus response efforts, including the administration’s massive bailout for small businesses and nearly $500 billion in loans for corporations.

Run along now watchdogs, go play with your chew toys.

Mnuchin surprised many lawmakers last week when he announced he would not allow the names of Paycheck Protection Program recipients to become public after the Trump administration had said for months that the data would eventually be disclosed.

I’m thinking “surprised” is probably not the most exact word for the lawmakers’ reaction.

Basically Trump and his enforcers think Congress gave them a trillion dollars to play with and that they don’t have to tell anyone a damn thing about what they’re doing with it. That would be a pretty strange way of conducting government.

Oh really?

But what about all the abuse from trans activists and their “allies”?

The Graun:

The group of campaigners said that while they strongly opposed the Harry Potter author’s stance on trans rights, they stood in solidarity with her against the newspaper’s “abhorrent” approach to a domestic violence story.

“Misogyny is a pervasive force and one that treats survivors and victims of sexual and domestic violence as bylines to their abuser’s story,” the trans and non-binary activists said in the letter to the Sun’s editor, Victoria Newton.

But what about those activists n allies?

Needs a slap, slap that bitch, slap the shit out of jk rowling bitchass, I will slap the fuck out of you, I just want to bitchslap Jk Rowling, i stand with jk rowling so that i can slap her in the back of the head, I WOULD SLAP JK ROWLING IN THR FUCKING FACE IF I COULD, there has to be a line of people just desperate to slap jk rowling in the face

Any “trans and nonbinary activists” writing to anyone to protest that?

Nah. They agree with it. They incite it.

Trump points out that if we stopped looking for the coronavirus we wouldn’t find so much of it so then the stats would look better. Can’t argue with him there.

“If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, actually,” the president said during a roundtable event for seniors.

Well no that’s not quite right. He was so close. We wouldn’t have very few cases – we would know about very few cases. Different thing.

I wonder if he knows that. I wonder if he knows that’s a different thing. Does he think he disappears when he closes his eyes?

The president expressed a similar sentiment in March, telling Fox News that he didn’t want infected patients from a cruise ship to disembark because it would increase the number of reported cases in the US.

“I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said at the time. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

His comment on Monday comes as multiple states across the country are seeing spikes in confirmed cases as they relax social-distancing guidelines and begin reopening their economies.

And he wants the spikes to be kept a secret so that the states can keep relaxing the guidelines and reopen their economies.

Shakina is a trans woman.

Hey look who’s a star –

Artymorty that’s who.

There will be no problem with holding a campaign rally during a pandemic. Here, sign this waiver.

Republican lawmakers are downplaying concerns that a Donald Trump indoor rally planned for Tulsa, Oklahoma, for next weekend could contribute to the spread Covid-19, amid an increase in cases in the city.

The Tulsa city-county health department director, Bruce Dart, said he worried the rally could be dangerous for attendees as well as the president.

“I wish we could postpone this to a time when the virus isn’t as large a concern as it is today,” Dart told Tulsa World.

That is, he wishes Trump were not forcing it on them.

James Lankford, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, said on Sunday the rally did not need to be postponed because the increase in coronavirus cases is “a little bit of a bump”.

In fact it is too early to say if the increase is small and temporary.

“Our deaths continue to decline and we encourage people that are high risk not to get involved in any location, whether that be a rally or other higher-risk locations,” Lankford told ABC’s This Week.

“So, high-risk folks need to be able to step back and everybody needs to be able to take responsibility for their own health.”

Ah yes – hold the dangerous rally and then tell the fans to take responsibility for their own health. Come to the rally, and if you get sick you’re own your own, love ya!

The White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said attendees at the rally “must observe the safety guidelines”.

“The social distancing must be observed,” Kudlow told CNN’s State of the Union. “Face coverings in key places must be observed.”

Except by Trump.

The Trump campaign is asking supporters to sign a waiver that makes clear the campaign is not responsible if anyone gets ill from crowding with thousands of others in an enclosed space.

Nicely put. The campaign is not responsible for making people ill by crowding them in with thousands of others in an enclosed space. How do you define “responsible”?

Stumbling Don wants to put the kibosh on Bolton’s “I refuse to testify” book.

Donald Trump is set to sue to stop the publication of a tell-all book by John Bolton, his third national security adviser, ABC News reported on Monday.

They’ve already delayed publication by saying it has seekrits.

Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations, was national security adviser between April 2018 and September 2019. Controversially, Bolton did not testify in impeachment proceedings against Trump which focused on Ukraine and Trump’s attempts to bully the government there to investigate his political rival Joe Biden.

“Controversially” is putting it mildly. He’s a rat bastard and traitor.

“What Bolton saw astonished him,” his publisher said. “A president for whom getting re-elected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation.”

Oh ffs. That didn’t astonish him. How could it? It’s been on view, in big neon lights, all along – and by “all along” I mean all of Trump’s rotten life. John Bolton can’t possibly have been even mildly surprised to find that Trump doesn’t give a shit about anything at all other than Trump.

It is not clear the current threat will work. In January 2018, Trump threatened to sue to stop the publication of Fire and Fury, a book by Michael Wolff, after the Guardian broke news of its sensational content. Publisher Henry Holt responded by rushing the book to the public.

More of a publicity boost than a threat.

Again.

First – why is UN Women, or the social media officer of UN Women, talking about this at all? What’s it got to do with women? What’s it got to do with women’s issues? What’s it got to do with the reasons women need a UN branch?

Second – for the billionth time – none of that is true.

It’s not a simple truth that “trans people are who they say they are.” It depends on what they say. Some trans people describe being trans accurately, and some insist that they literally are the other sex, despite the fact that the word “trans” means they are not.

And especially, the witless announcement in the tweet is laughably far from the truth.

How people choose to define themselves is no one’s business.

Oh really. So if I choose to define myself as US Secretary of State it’s no one’s business? Even if I act accordingly, and try to make my way to “my” office at the State Department? If I choose to define myself as the driver of the bus I’m on and try to eject the person usurping the driver’s seat, it’s no one’s business? If I choose to define myself as your spouse, it’s no one’s business? If I choose to define myself as someone you owe eleven billion dollars it’s no one’s business?

It’s just complete absurd childish nonsense to claim that how people define themselves is no one’s business. That’s true only in instances where it doesn’t matter – how we define ourselves in our heads, the content of our fantasies, the games we play with willing others.

And yes, it matters to women if men start “defining themselves” as women and insisting that means we have to welcome them into our toilets and changing rooms and feminism. It is our business.

Some examples:

Harry Potter star Rupert Grint says ‘trans women are women’ as cast continue to distance themselves from JK Rowling

As JK Rowling faces a continuing backlash, Grint, who played Ron Weasley in the hit film series, expressed his solidarity with the trans community in a statement released to The Times.

A continuing backlash which we are contributing to with all our might.

Warner Bros, the billion dollar studio behind Harry Potter, pledges ‘inclusivity and empathy’ in response to JK Rowling

Actor James Urbaniak tells JK Rowling cis men don’t have to pretend to be trans to assault women: ‘War’s over, get out of your trench’

Yes that’s nice – man tells woman “war [on women] is over, get out of your trench” – nothing bullying about that, no mansplaining there, no sign of a man telling a woman to shut up about her womany problems and listen to the men from now on.

Pose star Indya Moore says JK Rowling ‘doesn’t understand how much death and violence’ are behind her ‘stupid’ opinions on trans rights

That’s four out of the 40 in those five days, and there have been more since then.

The war is not over – this is the war, and it’s a war on women, and it’s unrelenting.

God I hate these people.

Accurate.

Actual fake news:

Fox News published digitally altered and misleading images on its website’s homepage Friday that made a demonstration in Seattle, in which a group of largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters have occupied six city blocks, appear violent and dangerous.

The deceitful tactic was called out by The Seattle Times. The local newspaper reported that when it asked Fox News about the images, the network removed them.

“Oh, you noticed that? Well fine, we’ll take them down then. Excuuuuuse us.”

Fox News’ depiction of the demonstration mirrors much of right-wing media’s attempt to portray it as menacing. Protesters have declared a small slice of Seattle an “autonomous zone” after clashes with authorities led police to evacuate a precinct. While there have been some sightings of armed individuals, the area has remained largely peaceful with people gathering for food, speeches, and movie screenings.

Well we can’t have that. We have to squash it. How do we do that? By telling the world it is what it isn’t.

Among the photos that Fox News published on its homepage was one that showed a protester running past a burning vehicle and building with the headline “CRAZY TOWN” blaring across the website. The image, which accompanied a story about the situation in Seattle, was in fact taken from the unrest last month in Minnesota.

Well they’re only a couple of thousand miles apart.

In other photos that showed the scene in Seattle, Fox News digitally added an image of a man armed with an assault rifle.

Fox told more lies in its explanation to the Seattle Times.

Furthermore, his difficulty walking and holding a glass is in fact suggestive of a medical issue.

Trump, who turned 74 on Sunday, was the oldest person ever to assume the presidency, after an election in which he questioned the health of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, notably mockingly imitating her stumble at a 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York. Speculation about Trump’s health has duly dogged his time in office.

Parenthetically – how old is Biden? 77. He turns 78 in November. Trump was the oldest at 70 so Biden if elected will beat that by eight years. He should never have run. It pisses me off.

But back to Trump.

Such speculation continued on Saturday with regard to an unscheduled visit to hospital last November, which the White House said at the time was for Trump’s annual physical. No such results have yet been published.

So it wasn’t his annual physical, was it.

Observers focused on Trump’s familiar use of two hands to drink from a bottle [glass] of water during his West Point visit.

Bandy Lee, a Yale psychiatrist and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, wrote on Twitter: “This is a persistent neurological sign that, combined with others, would be concerning enough to require a brain scan.”

…

Of Trump’s walk down the ramp at West Point, Lee added: “The uneven gait is something I have remarked at least since his fall visit to Walter Reed, and a forward-leaning posture is associated with the difficulty holding a cup. Note that there has not been an annual report on his health this year.”

So the forward lean may be not an attempt to hide his gut but a symptom of brain problems.

Fabulous. What could go wrong?

Oh Donald. You’re such a putz.

While it is common for politicians to boast about their accomplishments, “successfully walked down ramp” is not usually the kind of achievement a president of the United States would emphasize in his messaging. But Donald Trump’s campaign is predicated on depicting his opponent, Joe Biden, as a helpless invalid, and himself as a virile and improbably healthy male who sleeps with models, or at least in the same building as them, in return for compensation commensurate with the task.

See also: the 2016 campaign, when he relentlessly mocked Hillary Clinton for having pneumonia.

But yesterday, Trump was recorded walking gingerly down a very shallow ramp, staring intently at his feet the entire way, after his address at West Point

Rupar’s clip again in case you’ve forgotten:

So of course he has to tell us that the ramp was practically vertical and smeared with bear grease.

Ran? He “ran” the very last step, and then did a weird arms pump as if to say he’d been putting on an act the whole time.

We’ve never seen him run. Literally not ever, not once. We’ve seen him take a golf cart while all the other heads of state walked; we’ve seen him push another head of state out of the way because he wanted to be in front; we’ve seen him walk allllllllllllll the way out to the helicopter on the front lawn. We have not seen him run.

Trump, quite typically, made a series of claims that are blatantly preposterous. The ramp was not steep. Nor was it long. The notion that it was “very slippery” seems hard to believe, given that the weather was dry and the general walking next to him had absolutely no difficulty. It is true there was no handrail, but this merely attests to the fact that the ramp was gentle and dry and did not require one.

It also seems hard to believe because would West Point do that? Put a slippery ramp in place for dignitaries to walk down?

I wonder if he’s explained the two hands needed to drink from a glass bit.

Trump did his West Point event today, the one that meant 1107 graduates had to leave isolation and return to West Point so that Bumbling Don could bumble through some words in front of them. As always when he reads a speech he sounded exhausted, clogged, sniffy, drunk.

Plus what he said was of course garbage.

“that many people have never even heard of,” he says with a tired sneer. He means he’s never heard of them, because he’s an ignorant lump of flesh. The ignorance of people who don’t care about anything outside of North Dakota says nothing whatever about the significance of a country or the people who live in it. It’s typical of Trump to think it does though.

Oops.

And it got worse.

People are speculating on the exact nature of his physical deterioration. Maybe it’s all the evil, maybe it’s poisoned his bloodstream.

Gender Heretic went to a reproductive rights panel at a progressive conference early in Trump’s dictatorship.

Donald Trump had just been sworn in, Roe v Wade faced its greatest threat since 1973, and activist friends were writing how-to books about home abortion, but the panel discussion was taking place in an entirely different universe.

There were no new strategies for activism on display. Instead, I heard lectures on the importance of pronouns.

Which is odd, because what could be less important in that context than pronouns? Every woman in the country could say her pronouns are he/him, it wouldn’t do a thing to protect abortion rights.

“Inclusiveness” and “intersectionalism” and validation exercises were vital things we all needed to learn and practice and be mindful about in everything we did to advance the cause of abortion rights.

Huh?

The only alternative was right wing bigotry, I was told. Abortion rights could be saved, and the larger progressive agenda succeed, only if activists spoke the cant correctly, in ritual format.

“Gender neutral” language would now replace the staid, second wave language of our foremothers in the new rituals of social justice purity. This meant changing our words and what we meant when we said them.

And what will happen then? We will no longer be able to talk about women’s rights when we talk about abortion! Hooray!

Reminds me of this:

And then it struck me: nobody was talking about women.

The word had not been erased, exactly. It had simply changed its meaning. “Woman” was no longer a kind of biology that is subject to patriarchal oppression because of its role in human reproduction.

The entire premise of reproductive rights activism had become unmentionable once again.

I was learning that “woman” now included men who say they are women, and that I needed to remember that not all people with female bodies identified as women, because avoiding “triggers” is more important than clear communication with someone about their own medical care.

I feel very avant garde, having been “reminded” of all that way back in 2014.

Again.

Do we see a lot of “The last thing the world needs right now is another rich black entitled man doing his learning out loud”?

No, because it would jar, because the other adjectives convey privilege, but black doesn’t.

But somehow we’ve decided it’s fitting to use privilege adjectives to pick out uppity women who dare to say things. Even when we are such women ourselves.

Also when did Rowling ever say that black lives don’t matter? Or that all lives matter or that white lives matter? When did she ever say that indigenous lives don’t matter?

I don’t know, but I’m betting never. I’m betting Gadsby just threw those in there to imply things without spelling them out. Shitty behavior.

Rowling must be punished for knowing the difference between sex and gender:

 The indiscretion for which she must be punished is saying that sex is real.

That’s sex as in male and female, not as in the activity. What kind of body a person has, not what they might plan to do with it in a “social bubble” (an England-only social bubble, it should be stressed). Sex as in the real, observable, and immutable difference between men and women.

Fortunately for her own sanity, the woman who made up muggles and quidditch and death eaters knows the difference between things that are real and things that are the product of human imaginations. She knows that sex is determined by chromosomes whereas gender is a made-up set of rules about how men and women ought to be.

Another important difference between things is the difference between ideas in the head and brute facts of the body. We can all imagine our bodies any way we like, and we can also change them in some fairly minor ways through makeup, piercing, exercise, surgery and the like…but we can’t change them too radically if we want to stay alive to enjoy the changes. One thing we can’t change is our bodies’ histories. We can do a lot to resemble the sex we’re not but we can’t change what we were when we first tasted the air.

Unfortunately, she also knows what it’s like to experience both domestic abuse and sexual assault, which is one of several reasons why discussions about sex and gender are personally important to her. She, like so many women, has a very specific dog in the fight about who should be included in the definition of “woman”, and how laws and policies should protect women’s rights.

And guess what: so do most women. So, in fact, do nearly all women. A few may be so sheltered that they never experience domestic abuse or sexual assault, but even they probably still experience knee-jerk contempt and dismissal.

With Wednesday’s post she has made it crystal clear where she stands. Yesterday’s headlines focused on the disclosures she has made about her personal experiences, not her challenge to the Scottish Government to reconsider its plans to reform the law around gender recognition. Those who stick to secondary sources will have read about the darkest parts of the author’s life, but will likely have little grasp of why she has decided to write about them now.

Those in the outraged online echo chambers might try their best to drown out voices who want to talk about sex, but telling people not to read the world’s most famous author feels like a losing strategy. This discussion cannot be ignored. We cannot vaccinate women and girls against male violence, so we have a duty to listen to survivors.

And a duty to refuse to let trans ideologues shut them up.

What is UN Women?

UN Women is the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls, UN Women was established to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide.

That doesn’t work if women no longer means women but instead means women and men who call themselves women. Men who call themselves women are not subject to the kinds of contempt and neglect and dismissal that women are.

Gender equality is not only a basic human right, but its achievement has enormous socio-economic ramifications. Empowering women fuels thriving economies, spurring productivity and growth. Yet gender inequalities remain deeply entrenched in every society. Women lack access to decent work and face occupational segregation and gender wage gaps. They are too often denied access to basic education and health care. Women in all parts of the world suffer violence and discrimination. They are under-represented in political and economic decision-making processes. 

All of that applies to real women and girls, “natal” women and girls, literal women and girls, not men and boys who decide they too are female despite having male bodies.

This shit isn’t a game. This isn’t dress-up. This isn’t a pantomime or a drag act or cosplay or let’s pretend. This is reality, hard messy painful physical reality. This is girls who miss school several days a month because they don’t have access to menstrual pads or tampons. This is girls who are married off at age 16 or 14 or 12, with all the future life prospects that implies. This is girls who are impregnated at 16 or 14 or 12 and who are left with fistulas after the birth, and are exiled to a shed for the rest of their lives. This is rape jokes. This is not letting women talk. This is always hiring the man. This is always promoting the man. This is not a game.

For many years, the United Nations faced serious challenges in its efforts to promote gender equality globally, including inadequate funding and no single recognized driver to direct UN activities on gender equality issues. In July 2010, the United Nations General Assembly created UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, to address such challenges. In doing so, UN Member States took an historic step in accelerating the Organization’s goals on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

But now its Twitter account is promoting the words of a misogynist young man rebuking a woman for saying that women are women.

Talk about institutional capture…

UN Women quoting a male movie star publicly attacking the woman author who made him rich and famous. UN Women saying men who think of themselves as women literally are women. UN Women throwing women overboard with a boulder chained to their neck.

Another man does a pratfall by misusing that Simone deBeauvoir line.

Applause for Nigel Warburton there.

But Pullman went off the rails.

She didn’t mean by men saying they are women. Nope, that’s not what she was saying.