So why doesn’t Harrop see it? Why do all the “TERF”-bashers not see it? Harrop’s claim is that people can’t overrule or overcome their sexual preferences and they shouldn’t be pressured to. What if that inability and right not to be pressured about it apply to more than just sexual preferences? What if they apply to other kinds of inter-relating?

What if, for instance, gender critical feminists can interact with trans women as women in some situations but not all? What if we want to reserve the right to talk to other women – literal women – about some subjects, especially those that affect us as women, because we’re women, and don’t affect men the same way, because they’re men? What if that wanting is something we cannot overcome, any more than Harrop can overcome his genital preferences? What if we can pretend to overcome but not actually overcome, and what if forcing us to do the first in all circumstances is not fair to us? What then?

Originally a comment by Roj Blake on Tiny favor, Scott.

Where do they get off? Why would they think Morrison has any interest in meddling with US internal affairs? Is Trump also asking other heads of state to wash his underpants, scrub his toilet, pick the nits out of his combover?

On December 27, 1941, Australian Prime Minister wrote in a “Letter to The Australian People” and published in that day’s Newspapers, “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” Although Curtin saw an equal partnership with the US, that has not always been the case. Historically, Liberal governments have tended to treat Australia’s role in the alliance as one of subservience, from Holt’s ‘All the way with LBJ’ to Howard’s ‘deputy sheriff’ doctrine.

Morrison is a Liberal in the same mould as Howard, and also an adherent of Hillsong Church, so no doubt Trump saw him as another easily manipulated evangelical.

I doubt most Americans are aware of it but in Australia the ANZUS Treaty has the status of Holy Writ amongst the Australian Right. In the aftermath of 9/11, John “Deputy Sherrif” Howard invoked the Treaty and thus began our national descent into yet another American Colonial War.

Yet, when Australia attempted to use the Treaty to get US support in standing up to Indonesian aggression in East Timor, the Seppos basically said, “Fuggedaboudit. What did you ever do for us?”

So yes, Australian Prime Ministers do make a habit of washing underpants, scrubbing toilets, picking the nits out of Presidential combovers.

The Post has more. A lot more.

Attorney General William P. Barr has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that President Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence agencies’ examination of possible connections between Russia and members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the matter.

In other words the top law official is using the Justice Department as a personal weapon to defend Trump against all accusations, no matter how well-founded.

The direct involvement of the nation’s top law enforcement official shows the priority Barr places on the investigation being conducted by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, who has been assigned the sensitive task of reviewing U.S. intelligence work surrounding the 2016 election and its aftermath.

The attorney general’s active role also underscores the degree to which a nearly three-year old election still consumes significant resources and attention inside the federal government. Current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials expressed frustration and alarm Monday that the head of the Justice Department was taking such a direct role in re-examining what they view as conspiracy theories and baseless allegations of misconduct.

Barr has already made overtures to British intelligence officials, and last week the attorney general traveled to Italy, where he and Durham met senior Italian government officials and Barr asked the Italians to assist Durham, according to one person familiar with the matter. It was not Barr’s first trip to Italy to meet intelligence officials, the person said. The Trump administration has made similar requests of Australia, these people said.

I could see doing this if the objective were to investigate how elections anywhere can be hacked…but that doesn’t seem to be the objective.

David Laufman, a former Justice Department official who was involved in the early stages of the Russia probe, said it was “fairly unorthodox for the attorney general personally to be flying around the world as a point person to further evidence-gathering for a specific Justice Department investigation,” and especially so in Barr’s case.

“Even if one questions, as a threshold matter, the propriety of conducting a re-investigation of the Justice Department’s own prior investigation of Russia’s interference, the appointment of John Durham — a seasoned, nonpartisan prosecutor — provided some reason to believe that it would be handled in a professional, nonpartisan manner,” Laufman said. “But if the attorney general is essentially running this investigation, that entire premise is out the window.”

In other words Barr is neither professional nor nonpartisan.

Democrats are likely to bristle at the notion of the attorney general devoting personal time and energy to traveling overseas asking foreign countries to assist in an investigation of U.S. agencies and personnel, particularly since Democrats have accused Barr in the past of acting in Trump’s interests at the expense of the Justice Department’s independence.

Yes, I daresay they are.

Matt Lodder tweets:

Richard Dawkins is promoting far right, white nationalist, Christian crank conferences now. That’s what’s happening. https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1178170072537264129

Also, Helen Pluckrose and her gang of bold warriors for intellectual truth are *speaking* at far-right, white nationalist crank conferences, in case any one still doubted the quality of their work and the rigour of their research.

The tweet is gone but

Pretentious postmodern nonsense is a serious menace in universities & contemporary culture. Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay & Helen Pluckrose are heroes in the fight against it. Hear them at the London conference on “Speaking Truth to Social Justice.”

They are thought leaders! Thought leaders of the finest kind!

H/t Screechy Monkey

Bolsonaro has a weird sense of humor.

Bolsonaro, an outspoken fan of the 1964-1985 military regime during which hundreds of political opponents were murdered and thousands more tortured, met with students at the gates of the presidential palace in the capital, Brasília, on Monday.

Video of the encounter shows one of the students saying, “Send a hug to my teacher.”

“You teacher is a leftist?” the president replies, as the crowd erupts with laughter.

“Tell her to read the book The Suffocated Truth. Just read it,” Bolsonaro says. “There are facts, not the blah blah blah of the left.”

The book he recommended was written by Col Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who in 2008 became Brazil’s first military man convicted for kidnap and torture during the dictatorship.

So read his book! He gives the facts! After he’s kidnapped and tortured you.

In a recent interview with the Brazilian media, one Ustra victim, Gilberto Natalini, described sadistic torture sessions that had played out under the watch of the man Bolsonaro considers a role model.

“It was a house of horrors,” Natalini said of the torture centre where he was held by Ustra’s men. “Once I saw them hang a man upside down by his feet and leave him there for almost 48 hours.”

Yeah but everybody should read his book though.

Sâmia Bomfim, a São Paulo congresswoman with the leftwing Socialism and Liberty party tweeted: “Those who encourage this monstrosity are accomplices to the suffering that plagued countless families during the dictatorship. Bolsonaro drinks from the sewers of our history.”

But with the rise of Brazil’s far right, Ustra has become a cult hero for some, with T-shirts bearing his face and chants of “Ustra lives” sometimes seen at rallies and events.

Hooray for torture. Reminds me of the Bush-Cheney years – hey waterboarding is no big deal, relax, pansy liberals.

Matt Yglesias at Vox reminds us why Congress isn’t getting much done (spoiler: it’s not because the Dems are “Do Nothing” as Trump keeps tweeting):

Both parties’ congressional campaign committees have polling that indicates the public is frustrated with Congress’ lack of progress on policy issues and therefore have adopted strategies centered on blaming the other party for inaction.

This theme recurs in recent Trump tweets on subjects ranging from China to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to nothing in particular, all of which repeat the phrase “Do Nothing Democrats.”

Under the circumstances, it’s worth emphasizing that this is simply false. House Democrats have passed a lot of bills, including conceptually ambitious legislation to curb corruption in politics and begin to address climate change along with a host of smaller measures. They’ve passed legislation on background checks for gun buyers, tried to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, tried to extend nondiscrimination rules to LGBTQ people, and tried to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour. The reason these bills — and measures addressing prescription drug prices, insurance for people with preexisting conditions, and consumer protection in financial services — aren’t going anywhere is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell won’t bring them up for votes.

It isn’t even that these bills are being defeated in the Senate. McConnell is aware that these are popular measures, and he doesn’t want to make his members cast unpopular votes against them. Consequently, Republicans have simply refused to let them come to the floor, even while pretending to be mad that Democrats are too busy with impeachment to legislate.

Great. The Republicans don’t want these bills, because they would be good for people, but they don’t want to be seen to vote down these bills, because they would be good for people…so they just throttle them out of sight.

Say what? The Guardian:

Elon Musk has unveiled a SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo to the moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system and land back on Earth perpendicularly.

What are they talking about? SpaceX has as of now designed a spacecraft that can carry crew anywhere in the solar system? That’s nonsense.

In a live-streamed speech from SpaceX’s launch facility near the southern tip of Texas, Musk said on Saturday that the space venture’s Starship is expected to take off for the first time in about one or two months and reach 19,800 meters (65,000ft) before returning to Earth and landing.

So they’re working on being able to reach 65,000 feet and return. That’s not exactly the same as carrying a crew to Pluto.

Reporting on the realities of space flight can be wildly misleading.

Trump crazier than ever.

Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser, especially when this accuser, the so-called “Whistleblower,” represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and fraudulent way. Then Schiff made up what I actually said by lying to Congress……His lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great Chamber. He wrote down and read terrible things, then said it was from the mouth of the President of the United States. I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason………In addition, I want to meet not only my accuser, who presented SECOND & THIRD HAND INFORMATION, but also the person who illegally gave this information, which was largely incorrect, to the “Whistleblower.” Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big Consequences!

These Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, are doing great harm to our Country. They are lying & cheating like never before in our Country’s history in order to destabilize the United States of America & it’s upcoming 2020 Election. They & the Fake News Media are Dangerous & Bad!

Laurence Tribe:

Trump’s implication that he wants @RepAdamSchiff executed for treason is unhinged, disgusting, and beyond intolerable. The president is acting like a raving lunatic.

Walter Shaub:

Trump saying he wants Schiff “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason” is terrifying—not for Schiff, mind you, but for Trump’s allies. It’s like the final thing you’d expect Hans Gruber to shout back up at John McClane while falling, if they were both politicians.

25th. He’s a danger to us all.

That’s funny.

Trump and other aides are frustrated with Mulvaney because he did not have a strategy for defending and explaining the Ukraine call.

Actually it’s hilarious. The problem is not committing an outlandish crime grotesquely festooned with sub-crimes which are in turn festooned with more crimes – the problem is not having worked up a set of lies to deal with exposure of the outlandish crime grotesquely festooned with sub-crimes which are in turn festooned with more crimes. It’s all the fault of the guy who didn’t lie fast enough!

The tweet links to a CNN piece:

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is on shaky ground in the wake of a bad week for President Trump, according to multiple sources with knowledge of discussions surrounding the whistleblower fallout.

The sources say the President is not upset with Mulvaney for the White House releasing the summary of his July 25 call with Ukraine’s leader or the whistleblower complaint because he had been convinced that it was necessary.

What Trump and other aides are frustrated with, according to the sources, is that Mulvaney did not have a strategy for defending and explaining the contents of those documents as soon as they were publicly released.

What’s he there for, am I right? He’s supposed to have a strategy for defending and explaining all of Trump’s crimes, corrupt deals, blunders, treasons, lies, insults, pratfalls as soon as they become public knowledge.

One of the sources says it’s not just the President, but also widespread frustration in the White House about the lack of a response plan to deal with the fallout after the release of the whistleblower complaint ignited more controversy surrounding the President.

Ok but seriously now – what kind of plan are they thinking of? What kind of plan could there be? Just the usual Trump routine of lying yourself blue in the face and then moving on to the next thing? But that’s where Trump has always been so confused: transparent lies are transparent. It’s sadly true that that fact hasn’t stopped him getting his filthy hands on the top job, but it does mean his reputation for nonstop lying precedes him wherever he goes.

Sarah Chayes in the Atlantic on Hunter Biden’s legal and socially acceptable corruption:

The whistle-blower scandal that has prompted the fourth presidential impeachment process in American history has put a spectacle from earlier this decade back on display: the jaw-smacking feast of scavengers who circled around Ukraine as Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-linked kleptocrat, was driven from power. Ukraine’s crisis was the latest to energize a club whose culture has come to be treated as normal—a culture in which top-tier lawyers, former U.S. public officials, and policy experts (and their progeny) cash in by trading on their connections and their access to insider policy information—usually by providing services to kleptocrats like Yanukovych. The renewed focus on Ukraine raises jangling questions: How did dealing in influence to burnish the fortunes of repugnant world leaders for large payoffs become a business model? How could America’s leading lights convince themselves—and us—that this is acceptable?

How indeed? I didn’t know any of this. Chayes is a former foreign correspondent for NPR, so that’s useful.

She dispenses quickly with the “Trump is worse” objection – of course he is, but that doesn’t make this shit ok.

All too often, the scandal isn’t that the conduct in question is forbidden by federal law, but rather, how much scandalous conduct is perfectly legal—and broadly accepted.

Let’s start with Hunter Biden. In April 2014, he became a director of Burisma, the largest natural-gas producer in Ukraine. He had no prior experience in the gas industry, nor with Ukrainian regulatory affairs, his ostensible purview at Burisma. He did have one priceless qualification: his unique position as the son of the vice president of the United States, newborn Ukraine’s most crucial ally. Weeks before Biden came on, Ukraine’s government had collapsed amid a popular revolution, giving its gas a newly strategic importance as an alternative to Russia’s, housed in a potentially democratic country. Hunter’s father was comfortably into his second term as vice president—and was a prospective future president himself.

There was already a template, in those days, for how insiders in a gas-rich kleptocracy could exploit such a crisis using Western “advisers” to facilitate and legitimize their plunder—and how those Westerners could profit handsomely from it. A dozen-plus years earlier, amid the collapse of the U.S.S.R. of which Ukraine was a part, a clutch of oligarchs rifled the crown jewels of a vast nation. We know some of their names, in some cases because of the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office: Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Leonard Blavatnik. That heist also was assisted by U.S. consultants, many of whom had posts at Harvard and at least one of whom was a protégé of future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

I did not know that either. How revolting.

Scratch into the bios of many former U.S. officials who were in charge of foreign or security policy in administrations of either party, and you will find “consulting” firms and hedge-fund gigs monetizing their names and connections.

Some of these gigs require more ethical compromises than others. When allegations of ethical lapses or wrongdoing surface against people on one side of the aisle, they can always claim that someone on the other side has done far worse. But taken together, all of these examples have contributed to a toxic norm. Joe Biden is the man who, as a senator, walked out of a dinner with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Biden was one of the most vocal champions of anticorruption efforts in the Obama administration. So when this same Biden takes his son with him to China aboard Air Force Two, and within days Hunter joins the board of an investment advisory firm with stakes in China, it does not matter what father and son discussed. Joe Biden has enabled this brand of practice, made it bipartisan orthodoxy. And the ethical standard in these cases—people’s basic understanding of right and wrong—becomes whatever federal law allows. Which is a lot.

It’s not a million miles from Ivanka’s profiteering. It would be nice if it were but it’s not.

The Washington Post reports:

The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email, reviving a politically toxic matter that overshadowed the 2016 election, current and former officials said.

As many as 130 officials have been contacted in recent weeks by State Department investigators — a list that includes senior officials who reported directly to Clinton as well as others in lower-level jobs whose emails were at some point relayed to her inbox, said current and former State Department officials. Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post.

Got that? The emails weren’t classified when they sent them but the Trump administration helpfully classified them now, so uh oh potential security violations. That’s totally fair.

To many of those under scrutiny, including some of the Democratic Party’s top foreign policy experts, the recent flurry of activity surrounding the Clinton email case represents a new front on which the Trump administration could be accused of employing the powers of the executive branch against perceived political adversaries.

He should ask her where she was born, too. He should start saying she was born in Paris, or Stockholm, or some weird treasony place like that.

A former senior U.S. official familiar with the email investigation described it as a way for Republicans “to keep the Clinton email issue alive.” The former official said the probe was “a way to tarnish a whole bunch of Democratic foreign policy people” and discourage if not prevent them from returning to government service.

The probe is being carried out by investigators from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Republican lawmakers, led by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), have been pressing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to complete the review of classified information sent to Clinton’s private emails and report back to Congress.

State Department officials said they were bound by law to adjudicate any violations.

Former Obama administration officials, however, described the probe as a remarkably aggressive crackdown by an administration with its own troubled record of handling classified material. Trump has improperly disclosed classified information to foreign officials and used phones that national security officials warned were vulnerable to foreign surveillance, according to current and former officials.

At the same time, Trump overrode the concerns of his former White House chief of staff and U.S. intelligence officials to give his son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner access to highly classified materials, officials said.

But that’s completely different because reasons.

Those targeted began receiving letters in August, saying, “You have been identified as possibly bearing some culpability” in supposedly newly uncovered “security incidents,” according to a copy of one letter obtained by The Washington Post.

Brand new! Never before seen! Found when they had to replace the dishwasher.

Those communications are now being “upclassified” or “reclassified,” according to several officials involved in the investigation, meaning that they have been retroactively assessed to contain material so sensitive that they should have been sent only on State Department classified systems.

Except that nobody thought so at the time, so how could that even work? Retroactively criminalizing is not a thing.

Many of those who have been targeted by the probe and found “not culpable,” described it as an effort to harass diplomats for the routine conduct of their job.

“It is such an obscene abuse of power and time involving so many people for so many years,” one former U.S. official said of the inquiry. “This has just sucked up people’s lives for years and years.”

All for political sadism. I’m so sick of these people.