Cue Trump screaming.

House Democrats issued subpoenas Monday for records from Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions, seeking information regarding President Trump’s business ventures as several congressional panels took steps to intensify their scrutiny of the president’s personal accounts and corporate dealings.

The subpoenas, first reported by the New York Times, were issued by the House Intelligence and Financial Services committees, which have been leading the Democrats’ probe of Trump’s finances. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee, said in a statement Monday that Trump’s “potential use of the U.S. financial system for illicit purposes is a very serious concern.”

This was reportedly one of Trump’s red lines for Mueller—Trump was so angry over reports that Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records about their relationship that he sought to fire him in Dec. 2017, per NYT https://t.co/7RJME39f1T https://t.co/S3cNXE59d5

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) April 15, 2019

The NY AG has also sent subpoenas to Deutsche Bank. If there’s nothing there, the President has nothing to worry about. https://t.co/uLzaV4k3po

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) April 16, 2019

And if there is…

And the courage awards go to…

Highly decorated track athletes Andraya Yearwood of Cromwell High School and Terry Miller of Bloomfield High School have been selected co-recipients of the 2019 Bob Casey Courage Award by the Connecticut Sports Writers’ Alliance.

And why are they “highly decorated”? Because they have male bodies but race against girls and so they win all the races. I’m not at all sure I consider that “courage”…

Both juniors, Yearwood and Miller are transgender athletes in girls track who have won individual Connecticut state track championships in multiple sprint events. Miller, who previously attended Hartford’s Bulkeley High School, recently won New England indoor track championships in the 55 and 300 meters.

Yes, of course they have, because they are male-bodied. They won all these events by stealing the wins from the girls who would have won if it weren’t for “courageous” Yearwood and Miller.

The teenage girls have publicly and courageously championed the rights of transgender high school athletes. Yearwood and Miller continue to face criticism from opponents who have questioned the fairness of their inclusion in girls track events. Opposition has ranged from anonymous digital comments and social media posts from across the country to a petition to ban Yearwood and Miller from currently competing in girls track. The girls have brought national attention in support of all high school athletes’ right to respect and inclusion, including an appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America.

Notice the speed with which we rush right past those questions about the fairness of their inclusion in girls’ track events. What about that?

One for the “least worrying worry ever” file: some Trump people who talked to Mueller are in a sweat that Trump might get mad at them. Waa waa; we’re in a sweat that Trump might kill us all.

Of particular concern is how Trump — and his allies — will react if it appears to be clear precisely what specific officials shared with Mueller, these people said.

“They got asked questions and told the truth and now they’re worried the wrath will follow,” one former White House official said.

Some of those who spoke with Mueller’s team, such as former White House counsel Don McGahn, witnessed Trump’s actions up close and were privy to key moments in the obstruction investigation and spent many hours with investigators.

One person close to the White House said there is “breakdown-level anxiety” among some current and former staffers who cooperated with the investigation at the direction of Trump’s legal team at the time.

They work for Trump. I can’t summon any sympathy.

In other news – Trump does another disgusting thing.

For the first time in years, the United Nations’ committee on racism will not contain anyone from the U.S.

According to a report from POLITICO on Saturday, the White House blocked the renomination of human rights lawyer Gay McDougall, who had served on the committee since 2015. The White House has not announced why it failed to renominate McDougall, or why it opted not to nominate anyone else to the 18-member commission. POLITICO reported that State Department officials had already informed McDougall that she would be renominated before the White House abruptly nixed the move.

NOPE. No American on any stinkin’ international commission on racism on his watch. America was born in racism and grew up in racism, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

McDougall, who was originally nominated by former president Barack Obama, is widely regarded as an expert on international human rights. She has recently spent much of her time highlighting the ongoing plight of Uighurs and other Muslim populations in western China, where an estimated 1 million or more Muslims are currently held in internment camps and forced to praise the Chinese Communist Party.

Well there’s your problem right there. Trump loves China, or at least Xi, or at least he’s under the delusion that Xi loves him and wants to help him. Trump also hates Muslims, all Muslims, liberal and theocratic equally, so he doesn’t want any US reps investigating their plight in his buddy’s country.

Neil Henderson shares some front pages.

LES ECHOS: La tragédie de Paris #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/4yIYjbErYn

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) April 15, 2019

THE GUARDIAN: Inferno devastates Notre-Dame #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/foxfjEaNGC

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) April 15, 2019

SCOTTISH MAIL: Nine centuries of history lost #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/yNZpe5ssRA

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) April 15, 2019

TELEGRAPH: Paris weeps #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/gu4bTCTjfB

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) April 15, 2019

LE PARISIEN: Notre-Dame des Larmes #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/HAkLDnLwws

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) April 15, 2019

Fox News is obsessed with Ocasio-Cortez.

A study found that the New York City Democrat was mentioned 3,181 times on Fox News Channel and its sister Fox Business Network during the six-week period of Feb. 25 to April 7, or just under 76 times a day. Not a day went by when she wasn’t spoken about on Fox.

The liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, which did the research, called it an obsession and said the first term representative has become the network’s latest bogeyman, “someone for hosts and guests to demonize, knock down and refer to whenever grievances need to be aired against the Democratic Party.”

I’m sure they’re professional about it though.

Tucker Carlson has called her an “idiot wind bag,” a “pompous little twit,” a “fake revolutionary,” ″self-involved and dumb,” a “moron and nasty and more self-righteous than any televangelist.”

Not so professional then.

Fox Business Network’s Stuart Varney illustrated another reason that Fox would pay so much attention to Ocasio-Cortez.

“We have an AOC segment every day, almost every single hour,” he said. “She’s good for our ratings.”

The way Trump is for Don Lemon’s, no doubt. On the other hand, there’s Trump and then there’s Ocasio-Cortez. They’re not exactly comparable.

Siiiiiiigh

As the world stared in wonder this week at the first image of a black hole, a new star was born here on Earth: Katherine Bouman, a 29-year-old postdoctoral researcher who developed an algorithm that was key to capturing the stunning visual.

On the ugliest corners of the Internet, however, this sudden fame for a young woman in a male-dominated field couldn’t stand. A corrective was quickly found in Andrew Chael, another member of the Event Horizon Telescope team, who, not coincidentally, is white and male.

On Reddit and Twitter, memes quickly went viral contrasting Bouman with Chael, who — per the viral images — was actually responsible for “850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm!”

The implication was clear: Bouman, pushed by an agenda-driven media, was getting all the attention. But Chael had done all the real work.

Oh yes, that agenda-driven media that is always giving all the credit to women while ignoring men. In what galaxy?

What hostile sexism looks like: Dr. Katie Bouman’s reputation is being battered across multiple platforms. Her Wikipedia profile, marked for deletion, fake accounts, her work attributed to a man (he’s renounced the lies). “Trolls” doesn’t capture it: organized sexist harassment. https://t.co/81uooZp8cJ

— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) April 13, 2019

Squalid Sarah Sanders pulls us down some more:

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Sunday that she doesn’t think congressional Democrats are “smart enough” to review President Donald Trump’s tax returns should they succeed in obtaining the documents.

“This is a dangerous, dangerous road and frankly, Chris, I don’t think Congress, particularly not this group of congressmen and women, are smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume that President Trump’s taxes will be,” Sanders told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace.

Yes, that’s what the executive branch is supposed to do: go on tv to call the legislative branch stupid.

“My guess is most of them don’t do their own taxes, and I certainly don’t trust them to look through the decades of success that the President has and determine anything,” she said, adding that attempts to obtain the returns are “a disgusting overreach.”

The decades of success facilitated by decades of cheating, lying, theft, and corruption. Those decades of success.

The Far Corner Café:

Click to embiggen.

I wanted to post about this yesterday but I couldn’t find reporting that got all the facts in one place. The Guardian has collected them:

Democrats including leading candidates for the presidential nomination have fiercely condemned Donald Trump and other Republicans’ efforts to smear the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, while urging other party leaders to do the same.

Attacks labeling one of two Muslim women in Congress as unpatriotic are “dangerous” and risk “inciting violence”, prominent progressives said on Friday, after Trump shared a video attacking Omar that included graphic footage of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Let’s not pretend that such things don’t risk inciting violence. We know they do.

Just last week, a Trump supporter in New York was charged with threatening to kill Omar. On Friday, Trump escalated attacks on Omar, tweeting “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!” with a video edited to suggest Omar was dismissive of the September 11 attacks.

The video used part of a speech last month to the Council on American-Islamic Relations in which Omar discussed the problem of Islamophobia, describing “the discomfort of being a second-class citizen”. After September 11, she said, advocates “recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties”.

The Fox-Trump faction zeroed in on “some people did something,” which is not the best choice of words but then the Fox-Trump people make some pretty terrible word choices themselves. Trump’s tweeting of that video is disgusting, as is the fact that he pinned it.

Rightwing critics have used an edited clip of the “some people did something” comment to falsely claim Omar, a migrant from Somalia, is un-American or not loyal to the US. Fox News and the New York Post, both owned by Rupert Murdoch, have devoted high-profile coverage to the misleading claims. Republican party chair Ronna McDaniel has also attacked the congresswoman.

Omar and others have called such smears a “dangerous incitement” to violence. Rashida Tlaib, the other Muslim American woman in Congress, was the first on Friday to call for Democrats to “speak up”.

“Enough is enough,” she wrote. “No more silence, with NY Post and now Trump taking Ilhan’s words out of context to incite violence toward her, it’s time for more Dems to speak up. Clearly the GOP is fine with this shameful stunt, but we cannot stand by.”

The Republican party and, in particular, the president.

Trump’s tweet on Friday came less than a month after a major white supremacist terror attack targeting Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand. The president’s own comments and falsehoods about September 11 have long attracted criticism.

He has repeated false claims about “thousands and thousands of” Muslims in New Jersey celebrating on the day itself; his business received money meant for small businesses affected by the attack, even though his businesses were not; he has claimed to have helped clear rubble from the attack site, a claim for which evidence does not exist; he has said he watched people jump from the World Trade Center towers from Trump Tower, four miles away, which would not be possible.

Perhaps most famously, in an interview hours after the attack on the World Trade Center, part of attacks in which 2,977 people were killed, Trump described his shock and disbelief. Then he added a comment that left his interviewers “stunned”.

Trump, claimed, falsely, that one of his own buildings had been “the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan”, after the World Trade Center.

“And now it’s the tallest,” he said.

How about putting that on the front page of the NY Post?

The pundits are declaring Elizabeth Warren irrelevant (after years of announcing she should run for president when she had only just started being a senator and was focused on that), but her ideas matter either way.

But since her initial announcement in December, Warren’s campaign has rolled out a series of detailed policy proposals in quick succession, outlining structural changes to major industries, government functions, and regulatory procedures that would facilitate more equitable representation in the federal government and overhaul the economy in favor of the working class. These policy proposals have made Warren the Democratic party’s new intellectual center of gravity, a formidable influence who is steadily pushing the presidential primary field to the left and forcing all of her primary challengers to define their political positions against hers.

The Democrats desperately need more of that. They’ve been letting themselves be dragged to the right since forever, and they need to knock it off.

Warren outlined a huge overhaul of the childcare system that would revolutionize the quality, cost and curriculum of early childhood education, with subsidies for families and a living wage for caregivers. It’s a proposal that she talks about in the context of her own career when, as a young mother and fledgling legal mind, she almost had to give up a job as a law professor because childcare for her young son was too expensive.

Warren has also proposed a housing plan that would limit huge investors’ abilities to buy up homes, give incentives for localities to adopt renters’ protections, and build new public housing. Crucially, and uniquely, her housing plan would also provide home ownership grants to buyers in minority communities that have historically been “redlined”, a term for the racist federal housing policies that denied federally backed mortgages to black families. The provision, aimed to help black and brown families buy their first homes, is a crucial step toward amending the racial wealth gap, and it has helped sparked a broader conversation within the party about the need to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves – a concept that Warren has also endorsed.

It’s easier to kneecap candidates than it is to kneecap ideas.

More of that cis privilege that women are so loaded with: a bill criminalizing most abortion is now law in Ohio.

The six-week abortion ban known as the “heartbeat bill” is now law in Ohio. That makes Ohio the sixth state in the nation to attempt to outlaw abortions at the point a fetal heartbeat can be detected.

Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill Thursday afternoon, just one day after it passed the Republican-led General Assembly. The law is slated to take effect in 90 days, unless blocked by a federal judge.

Now known as the “Human Rights Protection Act,” SB 23 outlaws abortions as early as five or six weeks into a pregnancy, before many women know they’re pregnant. It is one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country.

Once they realize they’re pregnant, it’s too late to stop being pregnant. Hahahahaha got you there, women! Sucks to be you. Shoulda thought of that before you decided to be born female, huh?

“The essential function of government is to protect the most vulnerable among us, those who don’t have a voice,” DeWine said as he signed the bill.

Is that right? Then let’s save flies, mosquitoes, bacteria, mildew spores, bed bugs. They don’t have a voice! It’s up to us to protect them!

Also note that DeWine is never going to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term.

The Ohio Senate originally passed the bill last month. The Republican-led House Health Committee then made several changes before sending it to the House floor, where it passed by party-line vote.

Beyond changing the name, the Ohio House version allows for the use of transvaginal ultrasounds to detect a fetal heartbeat even earlier in a pregnancy.

The bill institutes criminal penalties for doctors who violate the law. Doctors who perform abortions after detecting a heartbeat would face a fifth-degree felony and up to a year in prison. The legislation also allows the State Medical Board to take disciplinary actions against doctors found in violation and impose penalties of up to $20,000.

It will probably go to the Supreme Court. The forced-pregnancy views are the majority there.

No Pride Parade for you, Edmonton.

It is with heavy hearts that we inform you that the Board of Directors has voted to cancel the 2019 Edmonton Pride Festival. In light of the current political and social environment, it has been determined that any attempt to host a Festival will not be successful. Please keep in mind that we are a not-for-profit organization run almost solely by volunteers.

It has always been the goal of the Edmonton Pride Festival Society to host a safe and enjoyable event that is as reflective and encompassing of the entire community as possible, however given current events, we do not feel that this is attainable for this year.

Daily Hive has the details:

The cancellation announcement comes less than one week after a controversial meeting that saw police called after members of Shades of Colour, a community APIRG group that exists to advocate for queer and trans Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour, arrived to make speeches during the meeting.

I had to look up “APIRG” – Alberta Public Interest Research Group.

According to a post published on Shades of Colour’s Facebook page, The Edmonton Pride Festival Society believed that Shades of Colour and RaricaNow, a non-profit organization that promotes the rights of LGBTIQ+ refugees and newcomers in Canada, had arrived to protest, which prompted the call to police.

Shades of Colour states that neither their members nor RaricaNow’s members were protesting.

…

Following EPFS’ decision to cancel this year’s Pride Parade, Shades of Colour issued a release stating their disappointment at the outcome.

“It is with profound disappointment that we express our appallment at the actions carried out by the Edmonton Pride Festival Society, which culminated in their decision to cancel the 2019 Pride Festival,” an April 10 Shades of Colour post read.

“We are calling this decision for what it is: namely, a disavowal of deep systematic problems in the framework of EPFS as well as an attempt to dismiss, target, and put out of play the efforts put on the part of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour in the LGBTQ2S+ to point towards alternatives on how this organization carries out its activities.”

The parade was stopped for half an hour last year when people protesting the presence of cops and the military brought it to a halt.

In the months leading up to the April 4 meeting, Shades of Colour had laid out a list of seven demands for the 2019 Pride Parade, which included that the event open with a “protest lead by QTIBPOC, trans folks and their allies” that would replace the Pride Parade, and that all participants of said protest be either approved or denied by Shades of Colour and RaricaNow following an application process.

The demands also included that both Shades of Colour and RaricaNow be supplied with $20,000 each of the annual funds, that the SOC Team and the RaricaNow team be provided with money to access ongoing training, that $1,500 be provided to fund a SOC organized QTIBPOC sober dance party on the evening of pride, that a public accountability statement outlining the harm the EPFS has caused the QTIBPOC community be written along with a public commitment to rectifying that harm, that Shades of Colour and RaricaNow be featured on the front four pages of the Pride Guide, and that EPFS work with RaricaNow to support QTIBPOC refugees and newcomers.

So, that’s not a “protest,” that’s a set of demands, and quite exorbitant demands at that.

H/t Screechy Monkey