Aaron Rupar on Corey Lewandowski’s in-your-face confirmation that he lied to the news media:

Lewandowski, dripping with disdain, all but admits he lied during media interviews, prompting the audience to gasp at his brazenness. Hard to believe this guy is considering a run for US Senate.

Russell Berman at the Atlantic tells the story:

If anyone really got to Lewandowski, it was Barry Berke, the attorney Democrats hired to consult on their investigation and the staff member they designated to question the witness after all the lawmakers were done. Republicans had objected to staff members having the opportunity to question Lewandowski, and judging by Berke’s effectiveness, it was clear why they would be concerned. Berke caught Lewandowski in a lie when he played a clip of the former campaign manager saying on MSNBC that he did not recall the president asking him to get involved with Sessions or the Department of Justice. “I have no obligation to be honest with the media, because they are just as dishonest as anybody else,” Lewandowski replied, drawing gasps in the hearing room.

Trump tells Lewandowski to tell Sessions to obstruct justice, and Lewandowski tells MSNBC host Ari Melber that he has no memory of doing that, and then tells a Congressional hearing that he “no obligation to be honest with the media.”

The shamelessness is record-breaking.

House Judiciary Dems tweets:

Lewandowski admitted that he lied to the media and the American people. Here it is in his own words.

There’s an interesting bit where he says he tells the truth when he’s under oath, with a “come at me bro” air, as if that answer obviously met all requirements.

The job of the Environmental Protection Agency is, oddly enough, to protect the environment, but its next move is going to be telling California it can’t have stricter admission standards than the rest of the country. Must be dirtier! Is the law!

The Trump administration will announce as early as Wednesday it is revoking California’s authority to set its own greenhouse gas and vehicle fuel efficiency standards and barring all states from setting such rules, two auto industry officials said on Tuesday.

The move is sure to spark legal challenges over issues including states’ rights and climate change that administration officials say could ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump met with senior officials last Thursday and agreed to greenlight the plan to bar California from setting tailpipe emission standards or requiring zero emission vehicles, Reuters reported last week.

No cleaner air for you! Join the rest of us in the muck, it’s only fair!

The administration plans to issue separate rules rolling back Obama-era fuel economy requirements in the coming weeks. A formal announcement is tentatively set for Wednesday at the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) headquarters and automakers and dealers have been invited to attend, industry officials said.

Must use more fuel instead of less! Must hasten climate change instead of trying to slow it.

California has vowed to challenge the Trump administration effort, arguing that the United States has an obligation to protect the environment for future generations. “We’ll see you in court if you stand in our way,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said.

Some senior administration officials believe provoking a court battle with California gives them a historic chance to displace the state from vehicle emissions oversight and could give the Supreme Court the chance to revisit a landmark 5-4 2007 decision that found the EPA has the legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles.

Always do the wrong thing. It’s what made America great.

Montreal gets a new city pool. And guess what!

New Montreal City Pool Will Have Just One Changing Room & It Will Be Gender Neutral

There will only be one changeroom, and it will be for everyone.

Well, no it won’t be for everyone, because of the people who don’t want to change in front of people of the opposite sex.

• The City of Montreal has announced new plans for the forthcoming Rosemont Aquatic Complex.
• Most notabl[e] is the decision to opt for one, universal change room instead of two, gendered change rooms.
• The hope is that the decision will increase accessibility and optimize space.

Why would the decision increase accessibility? What are they thinking? What people are kept out of municipal swimming pools by “gendered” change rooms?

Most notable, perhaps, is the city’s decision to opt for only one, universal change room, instead of the traditional dual changerooms that serve males and females, respectively.

According to TVA Nouvelles, this decision was, in part, championed by Nathalie Goulet, head of social inclusion for the executive committee of the City of Montreal.

Ahhh, social inclusion – social inclusion via forcing people to take their clothes off in the presence of people of the opposite sex. People who don’t want to do that are excluded, but I guess they don’t matter?

For Goulet, this decision is a mark of social innovation and a move toward social gains that she feels significantly outweigh the financial investments required.

Yes, it’s innovation, but how does that make it a good thing? What social gains is she expecting? What about the people who won’t want to use that pool, or won’t want to let their children use that pool, especially if their children are girls?

Apparently, the president of The Association of Aquatic Managers of Quebec, Lucie Roy, is also on board. Roy feels the decision promotes accessibility, optimizes space and still manages to preserve privacy.

I’m still not getting the “promotes accessibility” part (because they’re still not explaining it, just saying it). Female and male changing rooms are accessible – there’s nothing about being for one sex or the other that makes a changing room inaccessible. Or are they thinking this meets a need of “non-binary” people? But even if you think “non-binary” people have a real need for all-genders changing rooms, which I don’t, it’s still bizarre to put their needs ahead of the surely far more people who don’t want to take their pants off in public.

The universal change rooms will consist of:

• 18 closed stalls that include a shower and a changing section
• 6 closed stalls without a shower
• 12 washroom stalls, which can serve as changerooms
• 3 open showers with soap
• 2 showers on the pool deck
• several lockers, both full and half size
• a storage room for school and other groups

The problem jumps out, doesn’t it – those three open showers. No thank you! Also how closed are the closed stalls? All the way closed? Or open enough so that those fun guys who like to sneak their phones under or over the partition can get their dirty movies? It makes a difference.

Patrons will be required to remain clothed unless in a closed change room, shower or bathroom stall. The open showers with soap are noted as “no nudity,” on the city’s website.

How lovely, and who’s going to monitor and enforce the rule in the three open showers?

Trump is in California to seek $$$ from rich people.

 Many details of his brief visit, accompanied by housing and urban development secretary Ben Carson have remained mysterious prior to his arrival, though Trump did make clear that he’d focus on the problem of homelessness in California.

By “focus on the problem of homelessness” of course he doesn’t mean provide public housing along with support for people with mental health problems or addictions or both, he means scraping up all the homeless people and driving them away, presumably to starve in a ditch somewhere cold and wet and miles from any millionaires.

Advocates across the Golden State, which has a growing homeless population and severe affordable housing shortage, have urged the US government not to further criminalize people living in poverty and instead increase funding for housing and other services, some of which Trump has cut in his budgets.

Naaaaaaaah we can’t do that, that would be Soshulizm, we have to punish them, drive them out, lock them up, maybe eat them – anything to make sure they don’t make a mess in front of one of Trump’s hotels.

At least the important stuff is being attended to.

My father just sent me this horrific article which mis-genders Sam Smith SEVEN times in the opening paragraph. Douglas Murray, please fuck off.

Ermergerd! Seven whole times!

But what is “misgendering”?

It’s not anything. It’s a made-up crime. It’s an invented solecism that isn’t a solecism at all unless you believe that “gender” is a real and sacred thing that can be the very opposite of a person’s literal sex. If you decline to believe that, then there’s just calling people she when they’re he or vice versa, by mistake or to be camp or jokey or mean. It’s not in any of those circumstances “horrific” or worth making a fuss about on Twitter.

If only we would educate ourselves.

WHEN WILL PEOPLE LEARN THAT GENDER IS A SOCIAL CONTRUCT READ SOME JUDITH BUTLER AND EDUCATE YOURSELVES BEFORE ACTING LIKE PRICKS

I have read some Judith Butler and I consider her a pretentious opportunist. I do not think she has the power to declare that men are women if they “identify as” such, not even if a Twitzealot tells me to in all-caps.

Via

The Guardian is live-reporting the Corey Lewandowski hearing.

“Anyone illegally attempting to impact the outcome of an election should spend the rest of their life in jail.” – Corey Lewandowski

He’s not talking about Trump’s repeated fake claims of voter fraud or Republican voter suppression efforts or even about Russian tampering in 2016, he’s talking about the right-wing conspiracy theory of alleged malfeasance inside the FBI as they investigated the Trump campaign.

Trump tweeted his gratitude from AirForceOne.

Nadler:

Nadler says Lewandowski is the subject of a “bogus claim of executive privilege” made by the White House.

Then he asks whether Lewandowski met alone with the president in the Oval Office in June 2016 as stated in the Mueller report.

Lewandowski says he doesn’t have the report with him and what follows is a ridiculous omnishambles of parliamentary procedure arguments and a fight between Republicans and the Democrats on the committee about stopping and starting the clock tracking how much time Nadler has to ask questions as Lewandowski stalls.

Lewandowski basically pretends not to be able to read, to not know what Nadler is talking about, to not be able to find the pertinent Mueller report passages. It’s somewhere between “the dog ate my homework” and “I lost my glasses” … and flipping the committee the bird.

All to protect Donald Trump.

What a shitshow.

Lewandowski, who never worked for Donald Trump while Trump was president, is invoking blanket executive privilege purportedly protecting conversations with the president.

Oversight! Republicans say Nadler’s time is up. They demand a roll call vote to declare time up, which as the minority they will lose but why not. Nadler calls on the clerk to call the vote. They can’t find the clerk.

…

Lewandowski again declines to answer a question from Rep Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, then Lewandowski kind of yells at her. Then they fight about whether he can see lines she’s referring to on a screen. This is getting kind of personal?

“You are obviously here to block any kind of inquiry into the truth,” Jackson Lee says.

…

Democratic Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia tells Lewandowski:

“You are like a fish being cleaned with a spoon. It’s very hard to get an answer out of you.”

I wish we could clean Trump with a spoon.

It turns out people are not shocked and horrified to learn that The Royal National Lifeboat Institution uses a small fraction of its funding to rescue people outside the UK, instead they are impressed and grateful and eager to send money to help.

Rather than being defensive about negative articles in the Times and Mail Online, the RNLI said it was glad of the publicity about its overseas work and hoped the coverage could help it secure a UN resolution on drowning prevention.

The charity’s website has had a month’s worth of traffic in a few days, with many people giving money for the first time.

Kate Eardley, the RNLI’s head of international advocacy, said: “We have been overwhelmed. For us any coverage is a chance to talk about the issue.”

So there.

Since the articles appeared, celebrities including Stephen Fry and Gary Lineker have shown their support for the charity. Eardley told how one of its workers was questioned by locals in a pub in the Lake District. At first they seemed against the overseas work, but the employee won them round and the bar ended up having a whip-round, which raised £79.

Take a look at yourselves, Times and Daily Mail.

The issue of the Acting Director of National Intelligence refusing to hand the whistleblower complaint over to the relevant Congressional committee is still an issue.

On Friday, House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) accused acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire of withholding a “credible” whistleblower complaint — made by someone within the intelligence community — from Congress.

It’s not usual to go public on this kind of thing – and it’s even less usual for a DNI to refuse to deal with the House Intelligence Committee.

Congress appears to have only learned of the whistleblower’s existence after Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson deemed the complaint of “urgent concern” and sent a letter to Congress informing it of the situation.

The allegation could suggest a breach of federal statutes, and Schiff’s decision to publicize the matter suggests the situation is an urgent one.

It seems quite grim – because it’s too much like a coup. Trump is having way too much success stonewalling Congress. He’s not a guy you can trust to do that for sound reasons.

According to Schiff’s letter, the whistleblower first sent a “disclosure intended for Congress” to the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General on Aug. 12.

That triggered a two-week deadline for Atkinson to review and assess the complaint.

At the period’s end — on Aug. 26 — Atkinson purportedly reached his conclusion, finding that the whistleblower had made a credible allegation that met a legal standard of “urgent concern.” He then submitted a copy of the disclosure and “accompanying materials” to acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, beginning another seven-day countdown to the deadline for Maguire to forward the information to the congressional intelligence committees.

This is where things get hairy. Schiff alleges that Maguire’s office has withheld the complaint from Congress, disregarding the law.

In other words refusing to obey the law. Breaking the law. Committing a crime.

The intel community watchdog’s letter launched an escalating battle between Schiff and the DNI. One day later, on Sept. 10, House Intel demanded that Maguire produce a full copy of the whistleblower complaint, the inspector general’s evaluation of the complaint, and any communications about the complaint between the national intelligence director’s office and “other Executive Branch actors including the White House.”

Schiff writes that on Friday — Sept. 13 — Maguire replied, denying Schiff’s request. That evening, the Intelligence Committee chair blew open the situation with a public press release, and spent part of Sunday on CBS’s Face The Nation discussing the issue.

Read back. It wasn’t a request, it was a demand – Maguire doesn’t get to refuse.

The situation follows on a brazen strategy by the Trump administration to stonewall congressional subpoenas at virtually every turn, and is playing out as another whistleblower drama — involving potential misconduct in how the IRS is treating Trump’s taxes — unfolds in the shadows.

In other words it’s a slow-moving coup. Trump doesn’t get to “stonewall” congressional subpoenas. He’s carrying on like a dictator, and he has no legal right to do that. He’s succeeding because his allies in Congress are letting him.

The Times (the London one) reports on guidelines on transgender pupils for primary and secondary schools from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC):

It seeks to protect not only those who meet the legal definition of gender reassignment but children “who are simply exploring their gender identity”. It applies to pupils of all ages, with or without medical intervention.

In sensitive areas of day-to-day life, where pupils have traditionally been separated by sex, schools will [be either] required or advised to open up to those identifying as the same gender.

So pupils who choose to identify as another gender should be allowed to use the changing rooms of that gender. Girls who are uncomfortable with the presence of a transgender girl are advised to use a private changing room.

That is, actual girls who are uncomfortable with the presence of a boy who calls himself a girl are told to fuck off and find their own private changing room. And it says “a transgender girl”; what if there are two or five or ten of them?

Trans girls should have personal, social and health education lessons, which include sex education, with girls. It would be “unlawful indirect discrimination because of gender reassignment” to place a trans girl with boys if the school divides the sexes for these classes.

It would be unlawful to place a boy with boys.

On school trips, schools can lawfully decide to place trans pupils in single-sex rooms if they identify with that gender. A policy that requires all pupils to use the facilities of the sex recorded for them at birth could amount to indirect discrimination against a trans pupil.

While forcing girls to share their facilities with a boy (or several boys) is perfectly fine.

Tanya Carter, of the campaign group the Safe Schools Alliance, which includes parents, doctors and teachers, said the group was “appalled” by the leaked draft, which “ignores the rights of girls”.

She highlighted the case of sex education classes for girls, which must now be opened up to trans girls. “What use is it to that pupil to learn about periods or breast development? No one is asking the girls whether they would feel happy with a trans pupil in that group. The EHRC has not listened to the voices of the concerned parents and teachers who would have to deal with the fallout if these policies are put into practice.”

Why hasn’t it? Why doesn’t it see at least the tension here?

Teachers are warned they would break the law if they failed to call transgender pupils by their new names and pronouns. The EHRC says pupils “do not have to follow a legal process to start using a new name at school”. Under-16s only need a court order or parental consent to change their name.

And there is no chance at all that any pupils will do this just to mess with everyone.

The watchdog’s decision to affirm a child’s self-identification worries Marcus Evans, who resigned this year as a governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, the only NHS gender identity service for children.

Evans, a psychoanalyst, said: “If John comes along to school and says ‘I no longer want to be John, I want to be Jane’ then if you immediately go along with the idea, you have made John cease to exist. But you can’t get rid of your psychological mind. We have all got to live for better or worse with ourselves.”

He criticised the policy of forcing other pupils to go along with a classmate’s decision to change gender identity. “Somebody they know as a boy they have got to think of as a girl. The confusion moves from the person to the rest of the class.”

And it’s tyrannical. It’s forcing them to say they believe a lie.

What kind of idiot pretending to be president goes on Twitter to say we’re “locked and loaded”?

Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!

How not to do foreign policy, how not to inform the public, how not to conduct war, how not to do diplomacy, how not to collect intelligence, how not to do government work – how not to do pretty much everything.

Laurence Tribe:

President Trump seems ready to let murderous Prince Mohammad bin Salman decide whether and when we strike Iran. So we have a Saudi Commander in Chief. Welcome to Trumplandia.

The Guardian:

As the diplomatic crisis deepened, Trump tweeted that reports he had been willing to meet with Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, before the attacks were false. “The Fake News is saying that I am willing to meet with Iran, ‘No Conditions.’ That is an incorrect statement (as usual!),” he tweeted on Sunday.

But political commentators were quick to point out that those comments came from Pompeo and treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, who five days ago said on camera that Trump was willing to meet with Rouhani with “no preconditions” at the upcoming United Nations General Assembly in New York.

In other words we have complete amateurs in charge of all this and we’re doomed.

Over the weekend a senior commander from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned that the Islamic republic was ready for “full-fledged” war.

“Everybody should know that all American bases and their aircraft carriers in a distance of up to 2,000km around Iran are within the range of our missiles,” the head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps’ aerospace force, Amirali Hajizadeh, was quoted as saying by the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

Saudi de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said the kingdom was “willing and able” to respond to this “terrorist aggression.”

Somebody should remind Trump of the Saudis’ role in 9/11, and then remind him again 5 minutes later, and go on doing that until his pulse stops.

There’s this idea that the truth is “exclusionary.”

Of course, that’s true, in a sense. Right answers exclude wrong ones; truth excludes falsehood. But it’s not true in the political sense of “exclusionary,” but many people think it is true. (Thus they exclude the claim that it’s false. Bigots!)

There’s a new comet in the sky of Facebook, called This Angry Inclusionist Enby Lesbian. Lets call him Taiel for short. Taiel explains:

You cannot exclude non-binary folks from identifying with whatever labels we choose.

That strikes me as a very odd way of putting it, but it fits with the overall interpretation of “exclusion” that has become fashionable.

Here’s the thing: it’s not “exclusion” the way saying “you can’t join our club” is exclusion. It’s “exclusion” only in the sense of declining to accept self-evidently false claims as true.

Taiel is right that people – all people, not just non-binary people – can identify with whatever labels they choose, but he’s not right if he thinks that means we all have to accept and endorse those labels ourselves. You can identify as a Saturn rocket; you can’t make me agree that you’re a Saturn rocket.

Truth, reality, facts are all “exclusionary” in that way because that just is how it is.

Oh god. More of that cis privilege we rejoice in:

A schoolgirl in Kenya has taken her own life after allegedly being shamed in class for having her period and staining her uniform.

The 14-year-old’s mother said her daughter hanged herself after being humiliated by a teacher, Kenyan media reported.

Kenya passed a law a couple of years ago making sanitary pads free in schools, but not all schools have implemented it.

The girl’s mother said a teacher had called her “dirty” for soiling her uniform and ordered her to leave the class in Kabiangek, west of the capital Nairobi, last Friday.

“She had nothing to use as a pad. When the blood stained her clothes, she was told to leave the classroom and stand outside,” the mother was quoted as saying in Kenyan media.

She said her daughter came home and told her mother what had happened, but then when she went to fetch water she took her own life.

She was only 14, she was new to it. It’s all too easy to feel ashamed and embarrassed when you’re new to it.

In Kenya, as in other countries, many girls cannot afford sanitary products such as pads and tampons.

A UN report in 2014 said that one in 10 girls in sub-Saharan Africa missed school during their period.

Some girls reportedly lose 20% of their education for this reason, making them more likely to drop out of school altogether, the report said.

Isn’t that just fucking great.

Why do girls and women do this every month? Because their bodies are where human beings are made. All human beings throughout history were made in the bodies of female humans. Women are the source of human beings – yet they are also shamed and called dirty because of the very processes that enable that to happen. Menstrual blood isn’t Ew Gross Stuff, it’s the life support system for a fetus if the woman gets pregnant. Humans wouldn’t exist without it but girls are tormented for having it.

It’s not fair. None of it is fair.