A female prisoner who was allegedly sexually assaulted in jail by a male-bodied transgender inmate has launched a High Court action for a judicial review of government policy.
She says the transgender woman, who is serving a sentence for rape of a female, groped her breasts in the prison toilets. Shortly after the assault, the victim was moved to a different prison only to find her assailant had also moved there and would be sharing accommodation.
She is challenging the lawfulness of the government decision to place trans-women prisoners convicted of sexual and violent offences against women in women’s prisons without, it is claimed, adequately protecting female prisoners.
…
The claim says the government’s national policy, implemented from October 31, states that “transgender women prisoners with gender recognition certificates must be treated in the same way as biological women for all purposes”. It rules they must be placed in the women’s estate unless there are exceptional circumstances.
So, again, when rights claims compete, men win – which, ironically, underlines the fact that trans women are men. The “right” of men to have their fantasies of being women taken seriously even by the state, even in its role as enforcer of the laws, trumps women’s right to be safe from men especially in captivity. Women in prison can’t just quit, leave, move, transfer if they don’t want to live in close quarters with men; they’re in prison. Men win, women lose, again.
Dr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play for Women, a group that has campaigned to highlight the risks to women, said: “We very much welcome this application to the court to grant a judicial review.”
Word spread quickly on social media this evening that Simon Fraser University has backed out of its decision to host the event entitled “#GIDYVR: How Media Bias Shapes the Gender Identity Debate” on November 2nd.
In addition to Vancouver feminist Meghan Murphy, the event was slated to feature Quillette Canadian editor Jonathan Kay and The Post Millennial contributor Anna Slatz, and was co-organized by Mark Collard, an SFU professor of anthropology, Amy Eileen Hamm, Holly Stamer, and GIDYVR. Free speech activist Lindsay Shepherd was set to moderate.
If all went as planned they started 22 minutes ago.
Collard, who had originally sponsored the event and assisted in booking the venue at SFU’s Harbour Centre campus, decided to withdraw his support for the event after speaking to senior director of campus public safety, Tim Marron. Marron explained that there was a high risk of violence as a result of the event.
“The senior admin had been very firm about respecting my academic freedom in terms of supporting the event,” Collard told The Post Millennial. “Tim explained what happened yesterday in a meeting between the SFU LGBT student group called Out On Campus and an outside group called Coalition Against Trans Antagonism (CATA). CATA was attempting to persuade Out On Campus to use direct action, discussing tactics such as pulling fire alarms and engaging in property damage. The ball was left in my court, and because of the safety concerns, I could not in good conscience allow this to proceed.”
There is apparently a report on the potential risks drafted by SFU security but Collard has not seen it yet—it remains with senior administration.
Threats of violence don’t do much to polish the reputation of trans activists.
Katie Herzog writes for the Seattle weekly The Stranger. One day she wrote an article about trans people who halt or reverse transitions. You’ll never guess what happened next.
Two days later she started getting hate mail.
“It is, by far, the most-read thing I’ve ever written,” Ms. Herzog said. It also made her “wildly reviled.” Seattle residents burned stacks of The Stranger and posted stickers calling Ms. Herzog a transphobe.
Ms. Herzog lost “dozens” of friends over the article, she said. She soon felt unwelcome at lesbian bars. She began to hesitate to give strangers her name. She felt like a “pariah” in her hometown, she said, and eventually moved out of Seattle to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.
Her main social contacts now are her live-in girlfriend and a small group of older female friends. “I’m not invited to brunch anymore,” Ms. Herzog said.
Been there, got the T shirt. (Except the brunch thing. I do not know this “brunch” of which you speak.)
The term for people who have been thrust out of social or professional circles in this way — either online or in the real world or sometimes both — is “canceled.”
This week, even Barack Obama spoke about online denunciation, personal purity and being “politically woke,” saying, “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”
Purity is not enough, and it’s not always even desirable. Purity can be racial or sexual or ethnic or national or religious, and none of those brands of purity-policing lead to good places.
Alice Dreger, a former Northwestern University professor, estimated she has counseled “about 100” people through their experiences being canceled. In doing so, she has become part of an “informal peer network” that includes two pugnacious writer-personalities: Christina Hoff Sommers, who rose to prominence defending Gamergate and coining “victim feminism,” and Meghan Murphy, who opposed adding gender identity to Canada’s human rights act.
Ms. Herzog had interviewed Ms. Dreger for her piece on trans people. “I told her, ‘You’re going to get slaughtered for this.’ She just laughed,” Ms. Dreger said. “Six months later, she gave me a call.”
“Katie thought what we all thought: The truth will save me. That’s what Galileo thought, too, and he died under house arrest. The same thing has happened to us.”
Did I think that? No, I don’t think so. I apparently did think I would be allowed to express some careful, reasoned reservations though. Ha! Nope.
Ms. Dreger’s chief concern is ensuring that the canceled person has access to mental health care, she said. The experience of public scorn is psychologically damaging.
“There’s an effect to being constantly told, in public, that you’re wrong and evil,” said Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex in England.
Ms. Stock has also received strong criticism for her writings on trans people. (She describes herself as “gender critical.”) She said she is “anathema” in certain philosophy factions.
She has also corresponded with Ms. Herzog and Jesse Singal, another journalist who has been scorned for his writing on trans people, and has developed genuine friendships with like-minded academics. “Some of us have even been on holiday together,” Ms. Stock said.
Brunch, holiday – these people speak a dialect I’m not familiar with.
Mr. Singal and Ms. Murphy may be case studies for people who don’t believe “cancel culture” is real, or effective. Twitter-based outrage hasn’t had a lasting, adverse effect on their careers or social lives. It has become a central part of their online personas.
For Ms. Murphy, getting canceled has brought her into contact with people she once considered her “political enemies.”
She was banned from Twitter for “targeted misgendering” and then sued Twitter over the decision. (She lost the suit but said she is currently in the appeal process.) While she thought it would hurt her writing career, she said the opposite occurred. “People tried to cancel me, and I was un-cancelable,” Ms. Murphy said. “It backfired, and I gained a bigger profile.”
It’s quite true that we should avoid relying on “us vs. them” mentality too much, and I suppose it’s healthy to reach across the left/right divide every now and then. I’m probably giving myself way too much credit here, but I believe I’ve always been the type to at least try to give the right’s ideas the benefit of the doubt — I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand simply because they come from the bad guys. I’m trying to find an old Jon Stewart joke from the early 2000s I used to be fond of, that went something along the lines that you could make the left turn against any idea by simply getting Joe Lieberman to endorse it. I’ve always been aware that there’s a lot of that kind of tribal in-group thinking on the left, and I’ve always tried to put myself above it and ground my political stances on reason rather than tribal identity. (Or at least, that’s what I’ve flattered myself into believing.)
But in practice it rarely mattered whether one’s leftist beliefs came from merely identifying as a leftist or from reasoning one’s way into them, because the two were almost always in alignment, at least as I saw it. There were enough reason-minded people at the helm of leftist thought to keep the herd on course. No matter how hard I looked, I almost never found instances where the right’s position seemed more reasonable than the left’s. There were some examples where the left was wrong, though, and I kept them in mind as important lessons the left should learn from: their betrayal of Salman Rushdie; their knee-jerk attitudes about religious rights; Noam Chomsky’s genocide denialism in Bosnia and Cambodia; etc.
But things feel different now. Everything has completely shifted. The leftist herd is now led by emotional soundbites spread through social media, and it’s drifted far from the course towards reason. The right recognizes this and are seizing on the opportunity to position themselves as the shepherds of reason, and some young people are getting behind them. And it makes me sick to my stomach with fear, because mingling in among the right-wing herd are a lot of dangerous, harmful ideas that could quite literally destroy the planet.
[T]he Toronto Public Library (the well-known free-speech-mongering fascist hive) was the scene of great turbulence when Meghan Murphy (feminist scholar, writer) rented a room in one of its divisions to give a talk on gender identity and its various legal and other implications.
Now people living in less enlightened cities than Toronto might think that a civilized, qualified woman — feminist, too — speaking on the subject of women, in the quiet dignity of a public library, to people (many of them women) who wished to hear her, was the very definition of adult public discourse, an illustration of a healthy civic climate, and a very fine addition to the intellectual state of democracy.
Further, and this is a key point, the very consideration that the public library system of a city was obligingly renting a room for discussion and debate was proof, if any were needed, that TPL was living up to the great traditions of libraries since they came into the world, of providing a haven for intellect, exchange and debate.
A haven for TERFs you mean.
Immediately, the cry went up from always alert trans-activists that the library system was hosting “hate speech,” that it was a place where “bigotry” had found a home, that as a publicly funded institution it had no “right” to supply a “space” for “transphobia.” To judge from the volume and intensity of the outcry, one would believe that should this Megan Murphy give her 40-minute talk to a hundred people who wanted to hear it, Toronto was on a slide to become the Rome of Mussolini, liberal culture would expire, and it would scarcely be safe to go out at night.
…
As for the embattled Meghan Murphy, the most tireless label plastered on her — in news reports, sour columns and in the howling street — was that she was a “self-described,” “self-designated” feminist. That she couldn’t therefore be a “real” feminist. The careless mouths making that charge were standing in a thunderstorm of irony and not noticing they were getting drowned in the downpour.
What is the axle on which trans-identity turns? … Give me a minute here … I’ve got to check … Oh, yes. It’s self-identification. Self-description. Per exemplum, Ms. Yaniv, late of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, and now bearing its fines, “self-identified” as a woman. That same self-identification gave Yaniv the “standing” to harass more than a dozen immigrant women.
Surely Meghan Murphy has a little more ground than self-identified Jessica Yaniv to assert the less troublous category of “feminist.” Feminist is — hold on — not even a biological state. Feminism doesn’t ask other people to wax its particles. It is an intellectual orientation.
In other words it’s a category it does make sense to “identify” as or with or into. It can still be debatable, we can still say it makes no sense to call yourself socialist or conservative if your views don’t align with your chosen designation, but it’s not pure childish make-believe.
But our brave trans-activists want to claim their “right” to nullify Murphy’s actual work, education and experience as a feminist because — by their angry tally — she just says she’s a feminist. I suggest that using “self-described” or “self-identified” as a term of scorn and rebuke is not the ideal tactic for a movement built on self-identification and self-description.
A world where Rachel McKinnon is a woman because he says so but Meghan Murphy is not a feminist even though she says she is and countless feminists agree with her is confusing at best.
Hamilton’s point was that guilt or innocence might be not be dispositive in impeachment trials. It was not that guilt or innocence doesn’t matter in the face of political power. There’s a temptation to conflate these two points. If the president’s defense has crumbled but that fact will not trigger his removal, does it even matter? In fact, the crumbling of the president’s defense matters a great deal—even if the wall ultimately holds, even if a large segment of the public refuses to engage that reality and even if a large cadre of elected officials chooses to keep escalating the noise instead of either accepting Trump’s guilt or mounting a substantive defense of his actions.
The collapse matters—even if it does not prove dispositive politically—because persuasion matters and thus persuasiveness matters. The last line of defense against a lawless, oathless president is the electoral process, and clarifying Trump’s conduct before the electorate is thus crucial to voters’ ability to make informed decisions. The process of evaluation itself also plays an important role here. The definition in the minds of members of Congress of what is unacceptable helps to articulate and reinforce norms of behavior. In a period in which we are fighting to defend norms, that articulation and reinforcement is a critical exercise.
I follow so far. (I’m not sure how true it is in the age of Fox News and social media flooded with lies, but I follow.)
It’s a little harder to violate a particular norm of behavior once you have publicly voted to impeach someone for it—not impossible, to be sure, but harder. Conversely, argue that conduct is acceptable or tolerable in a president, and it becomes a little easier to do it yourself. It is a notable fact that Democrats have not, by and large, argued for Trump’s impeachment based on his conduct—very likely criminal—in the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal matters. Having argued during Bill Clinton’s tenure that crimes undertaken to cover up mere sexual misconduct are not impeachable, Democrats are staying away from that one.
We can hope that something of the opposite effect is happening here: If the only consequence of going through this process is to make it a little harder for some Democratic president in the future to emulate Trump’s ongoing abuses of foreign policy and law enforcement in the service of political ends—because essentially all Democrats will have labeled the conduct as impeachment-worthy—that alone will be worth the process the country is going through now.
Eh? But Democrats don’t have a record of doing this kind of thing. I have a very hard time seeing Trump’s successful evasion of impeachment as worth it because it will discourage a future Democrat from doing what Trump did. That seems like saying it’s ok if Harvey Weinstein gets away with it because at least the process will discourage women from raping men.
It’s so strange when men think they will stop us from being feminists by telling us our rights don’t matter. Don’t you see you are only emphasising the need? It’s like thinking you can stamp out socialism with the message that poor people should know their place.
Now Republicans are shifting to the “Ok what he did wasn’t great but that doesn’t make it impeachable” defense. Apart from the squalor of that, there’s also the inconvenient fact that it’s not true.
The argument, according to constitutional experts and historians of impeachment, is not a strong one. In fact, Trump’s conduct, according to analysts interviewed by the Guardian, hews more closely than any previous conduct by any other president to what scholars conceive as a concrete example of impeachable behavior.
What, you mean strong-arming a vulnerable ally to smear a political rival in exchange for aid? That’s impeachable? Whaddya know.
Frank O Bowman III, author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump and a professor at the University of Missouri school of law, said that Trump’s having extorted actions with no legitimate US national purpose from a foreign country that is “literally at risk of losing its political and territorial independence” without US support was impeachable.
“It’s plainly an abuse of power, and it’s plainly impeachable,” Bowman said.
“I think these are quite clearly, precisely the type of high crimes and misdemeanors that the founders not only feared but actually discussed at the constitutional convention,” said Jeffrey A Engel, co-author of Impeachment: An American History and director of the center for presidential history at Southern Methodist University.
“The high crime is the trade – give me dirt on Joe Biden and his son, and I’ll give you in return military aid and help with your economy – I think that is certainly impeachable,” said Corey Brettschneider, author of The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents and a professor of constitutional law at Brown University.
See, if he weren’t the president, he wouldn’t be able to bully another president to help him kneecap a personal political rival. Using the presidency for such a personal-interest act of bullying – yes that looks like an abuse of power to me.
In an Oval Office interview on Thursday, Trump compared his conduct favorably with the last two presidents to face impeachment proceedings, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
“Everybody knows I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Washington Examiner. “Bill Clinton did things wrong; Richard Nixon did things wrong. I won’t go back to [Andrew] Johnson because that was a little before my time. But they did things wrong. I did nothing wrong.”
Everybody knows no such thing, and it’s not true.
Trump’s analysis of his own behavior does not stand up to scrutiny, scholars said.
“Obviously the degree of severity is almost immeasurably different,” said Bowman. “With respect to Clinton, yes you had a violation of law, in the sense of his having committed perjury, but he committed perjury in order to conceal a private, consensual sexual affair. Now that’s discreditable, it’s also criminal – he got disbarred as a result of doing it.
“But in terms of the interests of the nation, not even remotely comparable.
“In this case, Trump is literally holding the independence of another country hostage to his own political interests. Not only is that contemptible, and in many ways more contemptible than what Nixon did, but I think it’s also true, and we’ve heard a lot of testimony about this over the past couple of weeks, that what he was doing is endangering an American policy objective, the whole framework of containment of Russian expansionism, the bedrock of our policy in eastern Europe for the last 70 years.
“It’s far worse, in that regard, I think, than what Nixon did.”
Of course, Russia sees it as a matter of containing US-NATO expansionism, but that’s another bag of cats.
…overshadowed by the publicity around the impeachment, is the ever-broadening investigation by William Barr, the attorney general, which the White House sees as a game-changer. An investigation which is seeking nothing less than to overturn the conclusion of the US intelligence services and special counsel Robert Mueller that Russia interfered in the last US presidential election.
This has now been designated a criminal investigation with power of subpoena and the possibility of prison sentences for those who have been allegedly involved in criminal actions, although exactly what these criminal actions entail remains unclear.
That’s because they haven’t made it up yet. They’re working on it.
The attorney general is focusing on the theory, aired on far-right conspiracy sites, and raised by Trump and Giuliani, that Ukraine framed Vladimir Putin over the US election in a complex triple-cross operation by impersonating Russian hackers.
Trump and Barr have also been asking other foreign governments for help in investigating the FBI, CIA and Mueller investigators. The US president has called on the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison for assistance, while the attorney general has been on similar missions to the UK and Italy.
And the information being requested has left allies astonished. One British official with knowledge of Barr’s wish list presented to London commented that “it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services”.
In order to protect the most shamefully evil president we’ve ever had.
The senior White House lawyer who placed a record of President Donald Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s president in a top-secret system also instructed at least one official who heard the call not to tell anyone about it, according to testimony heard by House impeachment investigators this week.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a decorated Army officer who served as the National Security Council’s director for Ukraine, told lawmakers that he went to the lawyer, John Eisenberg, to register his concerns about the call, in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens, according to a person in the room for Vindman’s deposition on Tuesday.
Eisenberg recorded Vindman’s complaints in notes on a yellow legal pad, then conferred with his deputy Michael Ellis about how to handle the conversation because it was clearly “sensitive,” Vindman testified. The lawyers then decided to move the record of the call into the NSC’s top-secret codeword system—a server normally used to store highly classified material that only a small group of officials can access.
That’s the senior White House lawyer right there – deciding that the thing to do with a record of the president strong-arming a vulnerable ally to find dirt on a political rival is to hide it. The thing to do about the crime is to join in it by covering it up.
Vindman did not consider the move itself as evidence of a cover-up, according to a person familiar with his testimony. But he said he became disturbed when, a few days later, Eisenberg instructed him not to tell anyone about the call—especially because it was Vindman’s job to coordinate the interagency process with regard to Ukraine policy.
Eisenberg’s decision to move the call record to the codeword system following his conversation with Vindman was first reported by The Washington Post. But Eisenberg’s subsequent request that Vindman not disclose the content of the call to anyone has not been previously reported.
The NSC and Eisenberg ignored Politico’s requests for comment.
Eisenberg’s purported request that Vindman keep the call a secret raises questions about whether the lawyers’ intent was to bury the conversation altogether. It also undermines Trump’s insistence that the call was “perfect.”
Rachel McKinnon — the so-called defending “world champion” of women’s track cycling — is a man. I’ll repeat that so my meaning cannot be misconstrued. He is a man.
Maybe my kind-hearted reader is offended by this blunt phrasing. Why am I calling McKinnon a man — when, perhaps for complicated reasons, he would rather be called a woman? Why don’t I compromise and call him a “trans woman,” as others do? Or be polite and address him by “she/her” pronouns, like everyone else in the media?
I doubt that many readers of National Review have that particular brand of kind-heartedness – the kind that humors identity bullshit. Capitalism bullshit, market bullshit, antifeminist bullshit, yes, but identity bullshit, no. Not their thing. Once in awhile that makes them right.
This is precisely the well-meant, tragically naïve logic that has enabled a structure of lies and tyranny to be erected around us, a structure that most cannot opt out of without incurring an enormous social cost. It is a structure in which cheating and viciousness are rewarded while civility and truth-telling are punished. Rachel McKinnon is the perfect example of how this structure works and operates, as well as why we should resist it.
He is. He is more so than for instance Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv, because he has a respectable job as an academic, and is much better at righteous rhetoric than Yaniv is. He doesn’t come across as flaky the way Yaniv does; instead he comes across as a determined malevolent conscious cheat and bully.
For context: McKinnon lived unambiguously as a man (called “Rhys”) until the age of 29. In addition to male puberty, he has had a full experience of modern academia where he developed a particular enthusiasm for the philosophy of lies (literally) and for “gender studies.” Graduating first from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, he completed a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo with a thesis on assertions, “Why You Don’t Need to Know What You’re Talking About” (the literal subtitle).
And later a book. Of course he did.
While serving as an associate professor at the College of Charleston, S.C., McKinnon decided to get into sport cycling. (Fair.) He won the 200-meter sprint record for women in the 35–39 range in 2018, and then the UCI Masters World Track Cycling Championship in the Women’s Sprint. (Not fair.)
This month, he defended his title. From the news last week: “Rachel McKinnon successfully defended her track World Championship title in Manchester,” per Cycling Weekly; “Prominent trans rights campaigner McKinnon has defended her right to compete,” per the BBC; “[McKinnon] found herself defending her title against a critic — the president’s son,” per CBS News; “McKinnon keeps dominating women’s cycling. And she keeps creating controversy all the way,” per the New York Post.
McKinnon keeps dominating women’s cycling because of that whole not being a woman thing.
Because McKinnon being a man is directly relevant to the argument that he should not compete against women, in calling him something other than a man, we obfuscate that argument — and all for the sake of a very recently invented set of blasphemy norms (e.g. “misgendering” and “deadnaming”) that don’t apply to us non-believers.
That’s a good way of putting it. They’re blasphemy norms in a religion we don’t adhere to or admire so leave us out of them.
Second, by pretending that McKinnon is not a man — but rather a vulnerable woman — we have forsworn all expectations of accountability and decency. The most egregious example of this, and the precise moment I decided to stop lending McKinnon special courtesies, was when he lauded the terminal illness of a young woman, Magdalen Berns, whom I held (and still hold) in great esteem.
Berns believed strongly that men cannot be women. As she lay on her deathbed in Scotland, at the age of 36, surrounded by her loved ones, McKinnon tweeted that he was “happy” when bad people died, that this feeling is “justified,” that Berns is a “trash human,” and further advised his followers “don’t be the sort of person who people you’ve harmed are happy you’re dying of brain cancer.”
That’s McKinnon. He should write a book on how it’s possible to be seen as progressive while calling women names day in and day out on Twitter.
So, can you compromise or appease a tyrant? You can certainly try. In a surprisingly balanced interview with Sky News — in which the interviewer explained that the science shows that even after taking testosterone suppressants, men retain indisputable physiological advantages that are especially pronounced in a sport like track — McKinnon explained why he thinks skeptics like me, who consider the science of sex, are wrong:
I’m legally and medically female. But the people who oppose my existence still want to think of me as male. They use the language that I am a man . . . If you think of trans women as men then you think there’s an unfair advantage.
Of course, nobody is questioning McKinnon’s existence — for how could the continually aggressive presence of such an unpleasant man be denied? What is being disputed is his belief that he is a woman and his sense of entitlement to compete against actual women. But for those who might be more sympathetic, or for those who don’t know quite how much of a thug he is, he makes the classic cartoon-villain mistake: overreach. Those who are not with him entirely, he explains, must be entirely against him:
[Sport] is central to society. So, if you want to say, “I believe you’re a woman for all of society except this massive central part of sport” then that’s not fair. So, fairness is the inclusion of trans women.
As it happens, I do not have an ideological commitment to gender terminology or pronouns one way or another. For struggling, respectful souls, I’m happy to lend special courtesies (in fact, I frequently do). But for cheats and liars, for bullies and tyrants, for those who seek to use my words to propagate deceit and injustice? Oh, just drop it, sir — I’ll never call you “ma’am.”
The Post reports that history is repeating itself as Bozo Trump bullies and harasses witnesses and legislators in an effort to obstruct the impeachment inquiry.
President Trump has sought to intimidate witnesses in the impeachment inquiry, attacking them as “Never Trumpers” and badgering an anonymous whistleblower. He has directed the White House to withhold documents and block testimony requested by Congress. And he has labored to publicly discredit the investigation as a “scam” overseen by “a totally compromised kangaroo court.”
All of that is attempted obstruction, and obstruction itself is an impeachable offense. Trump seems to be too stupid and too ignorant to grasp that, since he’s doing it all in public, rather than in secret as Nixon tried to do.
The centerpiece of House Democrats’ eventual impeachment charges is widely expected to be Trump’s alleged abuse of power over Ukraine. But obstruction of Congress is now all but certain to be introduced as well, according to multiple Democratic lawmakers and aides, just as it was five decades ago when the House Judiciary Committee voted for articles of impeachment against then-president Richard Nixon. But Nixon resigned before the full House vote.
“It’s important to vindicate the role of Congress as an independent branch of government with substantial oversight responsibility, that if the executive branch just simply obstructs and prevents witnesses from coming forward, or prevents others from producing documents, they could effectively eviscerate congressional oversight,” said Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.). “That would be very dangerous for the country.”
Democrats argue that the Trump administration’s stonewalling — including trying to stop subpoenaed witnesses from testifying and blocking the executive branch from turning over documents — creates a strong case that the president has infringed on the separation of powers and undercut lawmakers’ oversight duties as laid out in the Constitution.
It’s very likely that Trump has never so much as read the Constitution, and if he did read it there’s no chance that he absorbed it or understood it. He does seem to think his power is absolute, and that Congress is an annoying interference as opposed to an equal branch of government.
Laurence Tribe comments:
“I know of no instance when a president subject to a serious impeachment effort, whether Andrew Johnson or Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, has essentially tried to lower the curtain entirely — treating the whole impeachment process as illegitimate, deriding it as a ‘lynching’ and calling it a ‘kangaroo court,’ ” Tribe said.
“It’s not simply getting in the way of an inquiry,” he added. “It’s basically saying one process that the Constitution put in place, thanks to people like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, for dealing with an out-of-control president, is a process he is trying to subvert, undermine and delegitimate. That, to me, is clearly a high crime and misdemeanor.”
But Trump’s people think they get to shout it all down.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham proclaimed Trump’s innocence in a statement Thursday and dismissed the inquiry as an “illegitimate impeachment proceeding” that “hurts the American people.”
“Illegitimate” is the last thing it is. Calling it illegitimate is dictator behavior.
Barbara McQuade, another former Obama administration U.S. attorney from Michigan, said there is no standard for impeachment.
“Impeachment is anything Congress says it is for charging purposes in the House and for conviction purposes in the Senate,” said McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. “There can be some crimes that are not impeachable, like littering or jaywalking, and then there are some that are impeachable but not criminal, such as abusing one’s power for personal purposes as opposed to acting in the best interests of the country.”
Hmm. Has Trump abused his power for personal purposes as opposed to acting in the best interests of the country at all? Say, by withholding military aid to an embattled ally in an attempt to force the ally to help him knock a rival out of the next election? Can that be seen as at all self-serving and country-not-serving?
Trump’s treatment of Congress’s witnesses is reminiscent of his behavior during the Mueller investigation. He worked to keep witnesses on his side through a mix of personal warmth to those who appeared to remain loyal and public and private hectoring and bullying of those he believed had not.
…
Trump has been blasting witnesses now testifying against him as part of the House impeachment proceedings, even some administration officials that he appointed. The president slammed Ambassador Bill Taylor, a longtime Foreign Service officer who agreed to lead the Ukraine embassy at the personal request of Trump’s secretary of state, as a “Never Trumper” who had hired Trump enemies as his lawyers.
And that was Trump being restrained.
Trump has called Democrats leading the process rank names, accused them of treason and has said they should face criminal investigations for unspecified behavior. The president also has revived the same dismissive title for the impeachment inquiry that he wielded effectively for nearly two years against Mueller: “Witch Hunt.”
Trump also directed the executive branch not to comply with congressional requests for documents or testimony — a posture articulated earlier this month in a scathing memorandum to Congress from White House counsel Pat Cipollone that effectively declared war on the inquiry.
Keeping people from testifying based on intimidation or a pretextual assertion of executive privilege is the clearest element of Trump’s obstruction of the congressional inquiry, according to [Joyce] Vance, a University of Alabama School of Law professor. She said Trump’s obstructive actions have been obvious yet have not triggered commensurate outrage because they follow his now-familiar pattern of behavior.
He’s been a raging bullying asshole from day one (and before), so we have no new levels of outrage we can express.
The cost of being trans: I still get mail in my old name. Because of this, I am afraid to check my mail. Because of that, I sometimes miss bills that I need to pay. Because of that those outstanding bills have gone to collection. Because of that, my credit gets worse.
Replies are not universally sympathetic.
I have the same surname as my violent abusive alcoholic father. I’ve never thought about using it to get out of paying my mortgage but thanks for the tip.
No, this is a consequence of changing your name. Happens to lots of people. If you are afraid of seeing your former name, you should get some help – both practical and emotional. I hope life gets easier for you, bc no one can rely on the rest of the world changing to protect them
The cost of being a woman – I get mail, and organisations and systems and relatives and friends, using a name I have NEVER had. How? They unilaterally decided I had changed my name when I married. I didn’t, haven’t and never will do. I still pay all my bills. Life sucks. Tough.
Imagine losing a baby and getting mail from all the companies that latch into you once you’re pregnant. Did my best to cancel them all but still got a “your baby is now 4 months old” email. Life is painful sometimes.
I still get mail addressed to my dead spouse. That’s a sucker punch in the gut. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be for a bereaved parent.
I get mail addressed to my late wife. This can be upsetting. I am not afraid of it though. I open it, pay it if it’s a bill, ask them to change the name or stop sending it. Might I suggest you do the same and stop being so f***ing precious.
This is a built-in hazard with a putative Rights Campaign that is so thoroughly rooted in self-obsession. It can’t be anything else. An adult level of awareness of other people and their other minds and other views would tell you that how they see you is in effect what you are. Be a monarch or a pirate or a Nobel laureate or a movie star in your head all you like, but stop there.
People who aren’t narcissists do stop there. Narcissists try to force it on everyone, and call that “trans rights.”
Racist American President Donald Trump has endorsed Boris Johnson, praised Nigel Farage and attacked Jeremy Corbyn.
The bumbling bigot waded into the British election just hours after Mr Corbyn warned that Tory trade plans would see sections of the NHS auctioned off to American companies.
The US leader, who caged children on the American border before sending them to detention camps, told Nigel Farage that he believed that Mr Johnson was “the right man for the times”.
Ok but tell us what you really think.
Earlier today, Mr Trump was told impeachment proceedings into allegations he withheld aid to Ukraine, to try and bounce them into investigating potentially politically embarrassing allegations against Jo Biden’s son, would go ahead.
So obviously Mr Trump took time to attack the Labour leader.
An apparent push by an anti-vaxxer mum from Brisbane to contaminate Halloween lollies with chicken pox then distribute them to others is being investigated by police.
Pro-vaccination charity Light for Riley has shared a screenshot of a post to the Facebook page Stop Mandatory Vaccination in which the woman claims to want to “help others with natural immunity”.
“So my beautiful son (name redacted) has the chicken pox at the moment and we’ve both decided to help others with natural immunity this Halloween!” the post reads.
The person claims to have the opening and closing of packaging “down pat”.
…
It’s unclear whether the author’s post was a joke or not.
However, Greg Hughes, who started Light for Riley to promote the importance of immunisation after his baby son Riley died of whooping cough, slammed the post.
“Have you ever seen something that instantaneously makes your skin crawl?” he said on Facebook.
He lamented the “plan to intentionally infect other people’s children unknowingly by distributing contaminated lollipops to the community” and questioned why the parent would be “excited” by their child being infected with chicken pox.
He was also concerned the woman behind the post’s social media profile contained information indicating she was a nurse at a Brisbane hospital.
When contacted by 7NEWS.com.au for comment, Queensland Health stated they had no current or former employees who shared the name of the poster.
“This is a serious issue and has been referred to police, who are investigating,” a spokesman said.
Why are people that I never even heard of testifying about the call. Just READ THE CALL TRANSCRIPT AND THE IMPEACHMENT HOAX IS OVER! Ukrain said NO PRESSURE.
That’s Trump shouting in public that he’s never even heard of his own NSC people.
At first blush, that didn’t make any sense: how could the president, who’s been deeply engaged on U.S. policy toward Ukraine for months, not know his own top Ukrainian expert?
Yesterday, the answer to that question came into focus, though the answer wasn’t altogether satisfying.
After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in May, Vindman was eager to brief Donald Trump on the implications of the change in leadership in Kyiv. Politicoreported, however, on why that did not happen.
[H]e was instructed “at the last second” not to attend the debriefing, Vindman told lawmakers, because Trump’s advisers worried it might confuse the president: Trump believed at the time that Kashyap Patel, a longtime Nunes staffer who joined the White House in February and had no discernible Ukraine experience or expertise, was actually the NSC’s top Ukraine expert instead of Vindman.
Vindman testified that he was told this directly by his boss at the time, NSC senior director for European and Russian affairs Fiona Hill.
Er. The top Ukraine expert was told not to share his expertise with Trump because it might confuse him because he thought it was this other random dude who knows nothing about Ukraine.
Godalmighty.
That other person, Kashyap Patel, is an acolyte of Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, and according to Vindman, Patel “misrepresented” himself to Trump in order to help guide the White House’s policy toward Ukraine.
…
The Politico report added, “Vindman also testified that he was told Patel had been circumventing normal NSC process to get negative material about Ukraine in front of the president, feeding Trump’s belief that Ukraine was brimming with corruption and had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Democrats…. It’s still not clear what materials Patel was giving Trump, or where he was getting them.”
Cubicle or no cubicle. Curtain or no curtain. Open space changing or not. Men should not have access to any of these female spaces alongside women. @marksandspencer please clarify your policy on female changing rooms.
As a business, we strive to be inclusive and therefore, we allow customers the choice of which fitting room they feel comfortable to use, in respect of how they identify themselves. This is an approach other retailers and leisure facilities have also adopted.
But that’s not “inclusive.” It excludes people who don’t want to take their clothes off in the presence of the other sex. Lots of women don’t “feel comfortable to use” a fitting room with men in it, but Marks & Sparks is not allowing them the choice of a fitting room where that can’t happen.
Two years ago, on Tuesday October 3rd 2017, I attended a meeting in central London entitled ‘Progress and Challenges in Advancing Equality for Trans People in the UK’. It was held at Garden Court Chambers, in association with the Human Rights Lawyers Association. The meeting took place just two weeks after a well-publicised assault on a middle-aged woman in Hyde Park by a young male protester, which resulted in a conviction for assault by beating. The conflict between increasing rights for trans people and the rolling back of women’s rights was in the news. The Hyde Park Corner incident illustrated the lengths to which trans allies were prepared to go in order to prevent women talking about their rights and organising to uphold them. I attended the meeting at Garden Court fully expecting the emphasis to be on securing rights for trans people, of course, but I also expected existing law to be respected and upheld. I thought that women’s rights were human rights and that this would not be forgotten. I assumed there might be discussion as to how to square the difficult circle of trans rights versus women’s rights, but that lawyers would be the very people with the knowledge and skills to be able to do this.
But, no. Of course not. She describes the talks given in interesting and depressing detail.
There was then a Q and A which was mostly used up by requests for Bex Stinson to talk about transitioning at the bar, and for Bernard and Terry from GIRES, who were in the audience, to stand up and speak about their work. My companion that evening, Julia Long, kept her composure long enough to ask a question about the changing meaning and definition of ‘gender identity’, and Michelle Brewer answered with an assertion that ‘what gender means to the individual’ is the best way forward for trans people to explain themselves, so this is the definition needed in legislation.
Let’s go back up the page a bit to learn who Michelle Brewer is:
Next up was Michelle Brewer of Garden Court Chambers and the Trans Equality Legal Initiative (TELI). Brewer started by pronouncing that chambers is a safe space: there would be NO DEBATE about trans rights existing.
And no doubt also NO DEBATE about how you can have laws protecting “gender identity” while defining it as “what gender means to the individual” without creating a legal system designed to be chaotic.
Think about it. Trans rights exist, and there will be NO DEBATE about it; also gender identity is whatever each person says it is to that person. To sum up: people who call themselves trans have an absolute and non-debatable right to have absolute and non-debatable rights, and there is no way to define or question who is trans and who is not. Sounds like a recipe for ruthless exploitation and bullying, doesn’t it. Well guess what.
Saxby continues:
The rights of women were never on the table. Female prisoners expected to be housed with potentially violent males, female prison officers expected to intimately search male bodies, female asylum seekers expected to be housed with males, female litigants expected to refer to their male attackers as ‘she’, female crime statistics expected to incorporate male rapists, females in general expected to take a man’s word for it rather than believing what their own experience is telling them: none of these examples apparently merit a human rights approach when they are set against the perceived rights of trans people.
In other words human rights are for trans people. Women can have ones that are left over, provided they don’t conflict with the human rights of trans people, but that’s all – women can’t have specifically women’s rights because that would be discomfiting to trans people. Trans people come first and there will be NO DEBATE about it. Cue mobs baying at Meghan Murphy if you have any doubts about the NO DEBATE stipulation.
In April 2018, in a court of law, the victim of the Hyde Park assault, Maria MacLachlan, was forced by the judge to refer to her attacker as ‘she’. This removal of a woman’s right to speak the truth as she perceived it, whilst under oath, did not merit any public disapprobation.
A woman is assaulted by a much younger (thus physically advantaged) man, and the judge forces her to call the assaulting young man “she” – in other words forces her to pretend, in court, that her attacker was a woman. The assaulter has an absolute right to be called “she” because trans rights come first; the woman he assaulted has no right to call the man who assaulted her “he” because women’s rights come far far behind.
Two years on from the ‘Advancing Trans Equality’ meeting, and this week a barrister from Garden Court Chambers became the subject of a public shaming on social media for the sin of expressing her views on gender. Allison Bailey is a founding member of the new LGB Alliance, a group which has been formed to do the job which Stonewall once did, and look after the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. A lesbian herself, Bailey has publicly voiced her support for those who are same-sex orientated, in opposition to Stonewall’s new insistence on same-gender attraction. She compounded her transgression by chairing the Woman’s Place UK meeting in Oxford on Friday October 24th. The backlash has been instant and severe, including a Twitter pile-on instigated by Owen Jones, a call to arms from Gendered Intelligence (since deleted), and subsequent complaints to her employer, which Garden Court Chambers are ‘investigating’.
Any chance one of the investigators won’t be Michelle Brewer of Garden Court Chambers and the Trans Equality Legal Initiative (TELI)? My guess is no; my guess is she’ll be all over it like a bad rash.
Apart from their association with TELI, Garden Court is also home to other trans activists and allies. Alex Sharpe is a prominent trans activist on Twitter, unafraid to use offensive slurs against women. Sharpe submitted written evidence to the Trans Inquiry in 2015, as did Claire McCann. Both pieces of written evidence ignore women’s existing sex-based rights. Despite this, Garden Court members know they can wear their trans-allyship with pride, and they are duly celebrated on social media for doing so. The same pride cannot be assumed by those standing up for women, or for same-sex attraction. On the contrary, to be seen as an ally to women is often to invite condemnation. There is little support out there for the supporters of women. A law firm, especially one which has signed up as a ‘Stonewall Diversity Champion’, can promote the rights of one group of people at the expense of another and be applauded for it, as long as the group they are overlooking is women.
Well you see it turns out that that whole feminism thing was a big mistake: women are actually the top oppressors, and need to be ground down and kept down.
WINTHROP, Okanogan County — Follow the water and you’ll find the money.
That’s how it often works in the dusty rural corners of Washington, where a Wall Street-backed firm is staking an ambitious venture on the state’s water.
Crown Columbia Water Resources since 2017 has targeted the water rights of farms on tributaries of the mighty Columbia River.
This March, the company sealed a $340,000 deal for Douglas County water.
The same day, it paid $1.69 million for a farming partnership’s water in Columbia County.
And so on. Buying up water rights – the way some movers and shakers did in the Owens Valley in California back in the day, in order to divert the water from the Owens River to Los Angeles.
Piece by piece, the company’s lawyer, Mark Peterson, is constructing a portfolio to span the state, building out a plan he hopes will untangle the arcane world of water rights, and thrust it into a 21st-century free market.
Meaning, make it sellable for the highest possible price.
Some critics fear business models like Crown’s could lead to speculation or consolidation.
“We’re potentially allowing a marketplace to develop here that could be pretty destructive in the future,” said Paul Jewell, a policy director for the Washington State Association of Counties. “With a growing population and growing need for water, we’re going to be beholden to private interests with a profit motive for something that’s supposed to be a public resource.”
