Ahhh that’s a good look – State Department tells journalist she will get a Women of Courage Award then says “oh wait no you won’t” when it discovers she’s critical of The Leader. Foreign Policy reports:

Jessikka Aro, a Finnish investigative journalist, has faced down death threats and harassment over her work exposing Russia’s propaganda machine long before the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. In January, the U.S. State Department took notice, telling Aro she would be honored with the prestigious International Women of Courage Award, to be presented in Washington by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Weeks later, the State Department rescinded the award offer. A State Department spokesperson said it was due to a “regrettable error,” but Aro and U.S. officials familiar with the internal deliberations tell a different story. They say the department revoked her award after U.S. officials went through Aro’s social media posts and found she had also frequently criticized President Donald Trump.

Well you see it’s all about how you understand “courage.” Courage is exposing other people’s propaganda machine, not Trump’s.

There is no indication that the decision to revoke the award came from the secretary of state or the White House. Officials who spoke to FP have suggested the decision came from lower-level State Department officials wary of the optics of Pompeo granting an award to an outspoken critic of the Trump administration. The department spokesperson did not respond to questions on who made the decision or why.

The “optics”?

What about the “optics” of Pompeo granting an award to an outspoken critic of the Trump administration and thus demonstrating the administration’s ability to rise above personal spite? What about the “optics” of spitefully snatching the award away in a huff?

They don’t think carefully, these people.

“[When] I was informed about the withdrawal out of the blue, I felt appalled and shocked,” Aro told FP. “The reality in which political decisions or presidential pettiness directs top U.S. diplomats’ choices over whose human rights work is mentioned in the public sphere and whose is not is a really scary reality.”

Quite so. The “optics” of that are nothing to be proud of.

“I use Twitter to exchange ideas and share information freely,” Aro said. “I find the idea of U.S. government officials stalking my Twitter and politicizing my perfectly normal expressions of opinion deeply disturbing.”

Because it is.

After first being notified she would get the award, Aro filled out forms and questionnaires at the request of officials and cancelled paid speaking engagements to travel to Washington to attend the March 7 ceremony in Washington. The State Department also sent her an official invitation to accept the award and planned an itinerary for a corresponding tour of the United States, complete with flights and high-profile visits to newspapers and universities across the country.

They sent her an official invitation, and then snatched it back. Not cool.

Daniel Golden wrote a Pro Publica piece just after Trump stole the election, and it’s being re-upped now. It’s about the puzzle of how Jared Kushner got into Harvard.

I bet you’ve guessed already.

My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.)

I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision.

“There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

That’s the story of their lives, all of them – Donnie Two-scoops, Princess Ivanka, Prince Jared, Donnie2 the thug – they all bought their way into power.

Golden was doing research on rich people and donations to Harvard and enrollment of rich donors’ children. The name Kushner caught his eye.

Charles and Seryl Kushner were both on the committee. I had never heard of them, but their joint presence struck me as a sign that Harvard’s fundraising machine held the couple in especially fond regard.

The clips showed that Charles Kushner’s empire encompassed 25,000 New Jersey apartments, along with extensive office, industrial and retail space and undeveloped land. Unlike most of his fellow committee members, though, Kushner was not a Harvard man. He had graduated from New York University. This eliminated the sentimental tug of the alma mater as a reason for him to give to Harvard, leaving another likely explanation: his children.

Sure enough, his sons Jared and Joshua had both enrolled there.

Charles Kushner differed from his peers on the committee in another way; he had a criminal record. Five years after Jared entered Harvard, the elder Kushner pleaded guilty in 2004 to tax violations, illegal campaign donations, and retaliating against a witness…Charles Kushner had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with federal authorities. Kushner then had a videotape of the tryst sent to his sister. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

That’s who Prince Jared’s father is, let’s never forget. These people are rotten all the way through. (Jared could be a rebel child who repudiates his father’s loathsome ways…but of course he’s not.)

PJ’s daddy bought him entry to Harvard and then PJ’s wife’s daddy made him a prince with a security clearance he shouldn’t have and responsibility for the Middle East and Mexico and who knows what else he shouldn’t be allowed within miles of.

From fatuous drivel like this good lord deliver us. The BBC yesterday:

Like many little girls, nine-year-old Autumn Norris loves dressing up and experimenting with make-up.

She has identified as a girl for the past two years, after telling her mother she felt she was in the “wrong body”.

Autumn had just had a bath when she first spoke about these feelings. She wanted two towels, one for the hair and one for the body, “like a woman”.

“She then came out of the bathroom with her two towels, saying: ‘I’ve got something to tell you Mum, I’m not Anthony, I’m not a boy, I’m a girl’,” says Fran Norris.

Fran Norris, bizarrely, was struck all of a heap. I guess she’d never heard of “pretending” and “fantasy” and “play”?

Ms Norris, from Shifnal in Shropshire, believes it had been on Autumn’s mind for a long time and she had engaged in “feminine role-play” to explore her identity.

She would often come to her and ask to wear her clothes, put on make-up, do her nails or wear hair extensions.

tears hair

I know we’ve all said this a bazillion times but honest to fuck! Trivial external arbitrary conventions of dress do not make people this sex or that. Putting on lipstick does not magically make a boy into a girl and wearing jeans does not magically transform a woman into a man. Clothes, makeup, nails, hair extensions are just bits of flotsam that people put on and take off. I could put sour cream and chives on my head, it wouldn’t make me a fucking baked potato.

There’s more of the same bullshit and similar bullshit, for paragraph after paragraph.

I think the BBC is being held hostage.

ARE YOU KIDDING

A handful of male lawmakers dressed up for a hearing they presided over Tuesday in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, donning pearl necklaces as activists testified about their experiences with gun violence.

Pearl necklaces??

Ohhhh…right. ARE YOU KIDDING!!!!

Images from the statehouse — where legislators were considering arguments over a bill that would make it easier to take guns away from potentially dangerous people — caromed across social media as critics lobbed accusations of sexism and insensitivity at the necklace-wearing men.

The implication was clear, they said: These politicians thought gun-control activists were “clutching their pearls” in overwrought and self-righteous outrage — and, specifically, female outrage.

Because what, thinking gun violence is a bad thing is for sissies aka women? Because real men like gun violence? Because let’s laugh at women who don’t want to see their children shot at school or traumatized by seeing other children traumatized by the latest school shooting?

We’re on a downward slope to the pit of hell.

[Shannon] Watts, who attended the hearing, said she counted at least five representatives — all men — wearing pearls and sitting on the committee that held the hearing. One of them also appeared to sport a pin in the shape of a semiautomatic rifle on his lapel. She snapped photos of the lawmakers and posted them on Twitter, where she has nearly 300,000 followers, sparking outrage near and far.

Of the 13 person ERPO hearing committee, 10 of the lawmakers are men; half of them are wearing pearls to mock @MomsDemand volunteers. Meanwhile, their constituents are in tears as they testify about gun suicides and domestic gun violence in their families. #NHPolitics pic.twitter.com/eVIS73yfoR

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) March 5, 2019

Pit of hell.

Robin Buckallew is doing Women’s History Month again:

Here we are again, Women’s History Month. It seems like only yesterday…and at the same time it seems like a million years ago. So, since there are still women around the world who are penalized merely for being a woman, I will continue my pledge. I will once again write every day of the month, and focus on women.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A terrible example for Donnie Junior.

A Fox in a Box, and a Chair that Declares (under Hair).

Hmmm.

I do not like Big Macs and Fries,

I do not like them served with Lies.

I will not eat them in your House,

Not with Epstein, or with Krauss.

Please put your fountain pen away,

I will not sign your NDA.

I will not eat them on the Mall,

I will not eat them by your Wall.

I will not load your Smocking Gun,

Or covfefe on Air Force One.

I will not catch your paper towels,

Or Retweet all your Twitter howls.

I will not march in your Parades,

I doubt that you had stellar grades.

You claim the Largest and the Best,

Your Bigliness is manifest.

You find good people on both sides;

(You’re also cool with pesticides).

You’ve never paid the debts you owed

You are Two Scoops shy a load.

All this gold sure hurts my eyes,

I do not like Big Macs and Fries.

(With my aplogies to Theodor Seuss Geisel)

Eliza Griswold at the New Yorker starts with a story of a father and two sons, Pehlu, Irshad and Arif Khan, driving home from a market in Jaipur with two cows.

That afternoon, Irshad climbed into the truck alongside his father and brother. Cows are sacred to Hindus but Irshad had made this trip dozens of times since he was a boy. He’d heard rumors of potential trouble for Muslims at roadside checkpoints, where members of a militant Hindu youth group called the Bajrang Dal were intimidating Muslim traders in the name of protecting cows. Still, Irshad wasn’t nervous. “We had no fear at all,” he told me recently. “We were coming from a government-organized fair, and buying and selling cows is a legal business.”

The militant Hindu nationalism that the group espouses is not new. Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Gandhi, on January 30, 1948, was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., a violent right-wing organization that promotes Hindu supremacy. Members of the Bajrang Dal are the movement’s foot soldiers, deployed in instances of mob violence or for targeted attacks against Muslims and other religious minorities. Founded in 1984, the group was part of a movement to destroy the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque located in Ayodhya, India, which was built by the emperor Babur. (The mosque was ultimately demolished during a violent R.S.S. rally in 1992.)

Since Modi’s election in 2014 the Bajrang Dal have become far more powerful.

In the past seven years, according to Factchecker.in, an organization that tracks hate crimes, there have been a hundred and sixty-eight attacks by Hindu extremists, in the name of protecting cows, against Muslims and other religious minorities. The attacks left forty-six people dead. “It’s really a very, very bad moment for Muslims in India,” Salman Khurshid, India’s former foreign minister and the author of a forthcoming book, “Invisible Citizens,” on the systematic oppression of Muslims in the country, told me.

And, of course, a Bajrang Dal gang stopped the three on their way home and beat them up. The father died.

When the news of his death spread, the boys said that the mob returned and demanded his body so that they could desecrate it. The doctor hid the corpse in the hospital basement, and a police unit moved the boys to another hospital for their safety.

Nice touch.

Modi is up for re-election this year and he’s worried. People voted for him because he was expected to be good for the economy, but that didn’t pan out.

Some analysts worry that he will try to distract voters from the slowing economy by doubling down on nationalist rhetoric. “With little to show in terms of economy or development, Modi’s only remaining platform is nationalism,” Tanweer Alam, a political analyst, told me. Many critics argue that the rhetoric espoused by Modi and the B.J.P. has also intensified tensions in Kashmir, where the Indian government is struggling to quell a year-long spike in violence. In February, forty Indian soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber, who blew himself up by driving into a paramilitary convoy. The bomber claimed to be a local man named Aadil Ahmad Dar, who, in the past year, had left home to join the militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad, which is based in Pakistan. It was the most lethal attack in the region in decades, and Modi responded by threatening “a befitting reply,” and then launched air strikes against northern Pakistan. Pakistan subsequently shot down at least one Indian jet, further heightening tensions.

Could we lock Modi and Trump in a room and then lose the key? If you wanted to add Kim to the mix I wouldn’t object.

The US hasn’t helped.

The United States has generally remained silent regarding the repression of minorities in Modi’s India. In 2015, when Modi was selected as one of Time magazine’s hundred most influential people in the world, President Obama wrote a glowing tribute and said nothing of the militant nationalism that helped bring Modi to power. Despite President Trump’s public support of religious freedom, he has not criticized the oppression of religious minorities in India. Modi has made several high-profile visits to the U.S., including a state visit in 2017.

So that’s one thing both Obama and Trump got wrong; how touching.

Last July, the pattern of killings of Muslims grew so dire—in 2018, there were thirteen fatal cow-related lynchings—that the Indian Supreme Court demanded that the legislature formulate laws against the practice, which it has yet to do. Last month, Human Rights Watch released a hundred-and-four-page report documenting the violence, and the inaction—and abuses—of the government officials charged with investigating the crimes. “Lynching has become a nationalist project,” Mohammad Ali, a prominent Indian journalist who is currently working on a book about the phenomenon, told me. He said few perpetrators are punished, which has created a culture of impunity. Killers are lauded in some quarters as heroes for defending the faith and eradicating Muslims.

There are videos, many videos.

At the Khans’ house, Shabnam, Irshad’s wife, walked into the courtyard carrying their third child, an infant son, who screamed at the presence of strangers. She told me that their life had grown more chaotic with Pehlu gone; they missed his income, yes, but also the quiet order that he instilled in the family. “There’s no one to bind the family together now,” she told me. She had first heard of the attack a few hours after it happened. A police officer called from a nearby village to inform her and, soon after, someone sent her the YouTube video.

I asked her if it was still online; she nodded, and one of the local human-rights activists pulled out his phone and brought up the YouTube channel. We scrolled through it, looking for the attack. There were dozens of similar videos showing killings of Muslims, which were deeply disturbing both for their violence and for the obvious pride that the attackers took in being Internet stars. In one, a man wearing white pants and a bright pink sweater beat a Muslim man to death with a stick and sets him on fire, accusing him of committing “love jihad”: falling in love with a Hindu woman. After recording the murder, the attacker turns to the camera and says, “I am appealing to all Hindu sisters that don’t get into the trap of these jihadis. These people will win your heart and satisfy their lust.”

Then they find the video of Pehlu’s murder.

Updating to add: for further reading, HRW’s report on vigilante groups who murder cattle herders, and their links to the BJP.

Sarah Sanders issues a statement on the investigation of her boss’s racketeering.

Statement on Chairman Nadler’s fishing expedition. pic.twitter.com/tBsVzrtGYg

— Kayleigh McEnany 45 Archived (@PressSec45) March 5, 2019

“Killing babies.”

This is an official executive branch statement.

The incoherence of it all.

“I wouldn’t say they’re transphobic, but they need to be careful what they tweet”

Lucy Clark, football’s first transgender referee, reacts to comments of ex-sports stars like Sharron Davies and Martina Navratilova on trans athletes in women’s sportshttps://t.co/G0PEAgNlJL pic.twitter.com/oacPu0gtd1

— Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) March 4, 2019

Victoria Derbyshire asks “What about the suggestion that trans athletes should have a separate category of competition?”

So that muddies the waters right off the bat. The issue is trans women competing against women. Trans men aren’t being unfair to men or women by competing against men, so the issue isn’t “trans athletes” in general but trans women who compete against women. The bad question allows Clark to brush it off with “Come on, it’s 2 thousand 19 now” and similar generalities, ending up at “It’s totally unfair – we are human beings – nobody chooses to be transgender.” Wait, now – nobody? Do we know that? Does anybody know that? How could anybody know that?

Especially now that the standard has become “identifies as.” The Ideological Command is that if someone “identifies as” trans / a woman / a man / trans-non-binary / genderqueer and so on to infinity, then that is what she/he/they is. It is mandatory that we all take the identifying-as to equal being the category identified as; it’s a very serious crime to do anything short of that.

Given that fact, and the heated abusive rhetoric that backs up the mandate, how can we possibly know that no one chooses to be trans?

There’s also quite a lot of ideology around the idea that lots of people are potentially trans who haven’t quite realized it yet, or who are afraid to embrace it fully, or who are trans half the week and not the other half of the week. There’s quite a lot of moving between categories. There’s a lot of expansion of the categories, which means there’s a lot of variation in the descriptions of the categories. How, then, can we possibly know that no one chooses to be trans?

Also: there are a lot of psychopaths and narcissists and other kinds of shit-stirrers out there. There are a lot of trans women for whom the whole point of being a trans woman seems to be aggression against that inferior category of women who just are women, without the trans part. How, then, can we possibly know that no one chooses to be trans?

And even if none of that were true, still how could we know that no one chooses to be trans? It’s a mental state, and certainty about the mental state of all other people is not a thing we get to have.

Actually, it’s the other way around. Nobody chooses to be born whatever sex it is. We don’t choose it, it’s just a fact. We also don’t choose how well it suits us to be that sex rather than the other one, and that too is universal. There’s a range of intensity to how unheimlich our sex feels, and for some it’s so intense that they prefer to move to the other one – but that again is something no one can be certain about, including the person who feels it, because she or he doesn’t know how it compares to what everyone else feels. We all know only what it feels like to be ourselves, each one one at a time.

Lucy Clark is just wrong to make such a confident claim. Nobody can possibly know that no one chooses to be trans.

Prince Jared’s buddies the Saudi dictators:

A dual citizen of Saudi Arabia and the United States had been imprisoned in the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh for about a week when he heard a knock on his door.

Guards dragged Walid Fitaihi, a Harvard-trained physician, to another room, according to a friend who took down the prisoner’s detailed account of his treatment. Dr. Fitaihi told the friend he was slapped, blindfolded, stripped to his underwear and bound to a chair. He was shocked with electricity in what appears to have been a single session of torture that lasted about an hour.

His tormentors whipped his back so severely that he could not sleep on it for days, his friend said, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. The doctor had described the physical abuse, in general terms, to his relatives as well, a person close to them said.

The Saudis grabbed him in November 2017, in what they claim is a crackdown on corruption (yeah right). He’s still locked up. He’s a US citizen.

Lots of people were tortured in that “crackdown” and are still locked up.

But Dr. Fitaihi’s American citizenship means that his mistreatment, which has not been previously reported, may now pose a special threat to Saudi relations with Washington. The Trump administration is already struggling to quell a bipartisan backlash against the kingdom over the killing last fall of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, a Virginia resident and Washington Post columnist who was executed and dismembered by a team of Saudi agents in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul.

Prince Jared met with Prince Mohammed bin Salman last week, their first meeting since Khashoggi was tortured to death. They met so that Jared could play diplomat settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict some more.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has defied a congressional deadline to report about who was responsible for the killing. Instead, President Trump has equivocated about whether Prince Mohammed might have authorized it, even as he has extolled the value of Saudi Arabian oil sales and defense contracts.

The guy has his priorities.

Saudi officials have denied any mistreatment of detainees. A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington said the kingdom has signed the convention against torture and prohibits its use.

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia takes any and all allegations of ill treatment of defendants awaiting trial or prisoners serving their sentences very seriously,” the spokesman said.

Nope.

He’s doing it again.

In State Dining Room where Trump is about to present another college football team (North Dakota State University Bisons) with another of his legendary junk food feasts. Making America great, one Big Mac at a time. pic.twitter.com/7dm39ZxHCW

— Sebastian Smith (@SebastianAFP) March 4, 2019

Never mind that these college kids might prefer to have something more elegant and memorable to match the surroundings, just give them the crap they can get for a few bucks on any busy downtown corner.