This day is the saddest & angriest of my time in the Senate. The Republicans have succeeded in confirming a dangerous & deeply flawed nominee only by breaking all the rules & norms. The damage done today will be enduring—to the United States Supreme Court & to our country.

— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) October 6, 2018

We’ve got men who sexually assault women enshrined in the White House and the Supreme Court.

So, basically, contempt for women has now become official government policy.

It’s just a tad alienating if you have the bad taste to be a woman.

Oh, fucking hell. Sums it up.

Trump on AF1 was asked about women angry about Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

“I don’t think they are,” he said. Women are “extremely happy," he said, “because they’re thinking of their sons, they’re thinking of their husbands and their brothers, their uncles, and others.”

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) October 6, 2018

Of course. Women simply don’t care about their own well-being, even in the sense of not wanting to be assaulted and nearly suffocated by men who pounce on them when the mood strikes. Women care only about the well-being of men. This works out very nicely because men too care only about the well-being of men, so everybody’s happy.

Actually they don’t, lots of men do care about the well-being of women and girls, including their wives, their sisters, their aunts. But men like that don’t count because they’re wimps, they’re losers, they’re politically correct, they’re SJWs. Real men, men who matter, like Trump and Kavanaugh and McConnell and Graham, don’t give a rat’s ass about the well-being of women. If a nice Catholic school boy like Brett Kavanaugh wants to assault some slutty girl at a gathering with older boys drinking beer then he has every right to do that, and she should be thanking him for not smothering her.

So by god don’t come whining to us about any sexual assaults ever again, because we don’t have to pay any attention and we’re not fucking going to.

Welcome to the new reality.

Pig Kavanaugh is in, abortion rights and separation of church and state are on the way out.

Meanwhile…

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has received more than a dozen judicial misconduct complaints in recent weeks against Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice Saturday, but has chosen for the time being not to refer them to a judicial panel for investigation.

A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — the court on which Kavanaugh serves — passed on to Roberts a string of complaints the court received starting three weeks ago, said four people familiar with the matter.

That probably happens with every nominee, right? There are always soreheads.

The situation is highly unusual, said legal experts and several people familiar with the matter. Never before has a Supreme Court nominee been poised to join the court while a fellow judge recommends that misconduct claims against that nominee warrant review.

Oh.

Roberts’s decision not to immediately refer the cases to another appeals court has caused some concern in the legal community. Now that he has been confirmed, the details of the complaints may not become public and instead may be dismissed, legal experts say. Supreme Court justices are not subject to the misconduct rules governing these claims.

“If Justice Roberts sits on the complaints, then they will reside in a kind of purgatory and will never be adjudicated,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University Law School and an expert on Supreme Court ethics. “This is not how the rules anticipated the process would work.”

Yes but we’re in Trumpworld now, and the rules are whatever he chooses to do.

Henderson, whom President George H.W. Bush nominated to the bench, stepped in to review the complaints against Kavanaugh because Chief Judge Merrick Garland — whose nomination to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama was blocked by Senate Republicans — recused himself from the matter.

When they go low, we go high, and how’s that working out for us?

Another thing – small, but so typical.

A comment on that post of PZ’s:

Silentbob

2 October 2018 at 12:11 am

@ 94 John Morales

(I did withdraw from her blog because I was contentious there, and annoying her, but still, it was not because I was banned there. Like this blog, to which I have returned, thanks to PZ’s (hopefully juditious) sufferance, mainly because I’m not insincere)

I was also contentious and annoying but lacked your circumspection and first got placed in perpetual moderation (for quoting Gloria Steinem) and then apparently banned (silently, sometime in the past couple of years) despite also being sincere (if sarcastic). So I suppose your obsequiousness with respect to anti-trans attitudes paid off.

The historian Christopher Browning in the NYRB discusses the Trumpists’ similarities to and differences from Nazis and other fascists.

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Lies, Putin, Fox News, bots – it all adds up.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

We’re there now. He’s not talking about the potential future there, he’s talking about how bad it already is.

Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights. On these issues, often described as the guardrails of democracy against authoritarian encroachment, the Trump administration either has won or seems poised to win significant gains for illiberalism. Upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisers.

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of TheWashington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

But in the end climate change will override all that.

Have a nice weekend.

Oh look, it’s Melania really not caring again.

Melania Trump has prompted consternation, some anger and much derision by choosing a pith helmet – a symbol of colonial rule across Africa – as headwear for a brief safari in Kenya.

On the penultimate day of her tour of the continent – her first solo trip overseas – the first lady visited an orphanage in Nairobi before heading to a national park near the city.

Dressed in riding pants, boots and a spotless white pith helmet, the former model climbed into an open-air vehicle for the safari, taking photos on her iPhone of zebras, giraffes, impalas, rhinos and hippos.

They’re not making it up.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

What the hell is she wearing jodhpurs and riding boots for? Let alone the ridiculous hat.

Pith helmets – so-called because they are made of the material sholapith – were worn by European explorers and imperial administrators in Africa, parts of Asia and the Middle East in the 19th century before being adopted by military officers, rapidly becoming a symbol of status – and oppression.

Soldiers, guides and wildlife specialists replaced the pith helmet long ago with more practical and less controversial headgear, but they are still in ceremonial use in a handful of countries – and by tourists in Africa who have limited experience of local conditions and sensibilities.

“That pith helmet you have carried was used by colonialists during the dark days. Doesn’t sit well with us Africans. Who advised you?” wrote Pauleen Mwalo, of Nairobi, on Twitter.

Stephen Miller?

This is nuts.

The Vancouver Sun reports:

A new policy allowing Canadian transgender student-athletes to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity and without hormone therapy is a welcome change, but more can still be done to make athletics inclusive of gender diversity, says a Vancouver trans athlete and consultant.

U Sports, which governs university athletics in Canada, put its new policy into effect Thursday and says it affects student-athletes at all 56 of its member institutions. Athletes can only compete on teams of one gender during a given academic year, and the policy doesn’t require them to undertake hormone therapy. They must also comply with the Canadian Anti-Doping Program.

In other words people with male bodies can compete on women’s teams.

Ok, but then what will they do when the women’s teams become entirely filled up with people whose “gender identity” doesn’t match their sex? They’ll have to start all over, but with what team? Maybe they could try children’s teams?

In other words: people with male bodies have a huge advantage over people with female bodies in athletic competitions. The Sun article never even bothers to spell that out, all it can manage is mention of testosterone here and there.

“For me, it’s a step in the right direction,” said Kai Scott, a principal partner at TransFocus Consulting, which works with organizations addressing gender inclusion issues.

“I think these kinds of policies are really important. This one, in particular, is great for certain transgender student-athletes in that they can select the team or division that aligns with their gender identity. These kinds of policies are important declarations of support and assurance of inclusivity.”

They may be important declarations of support and assurance of inclusivity, but they’re also declarations of total indifference to women’s ability to compete on teams with people who don’t have the male body’s advantages over the female body. “Inclusivity” is not invariably and in all circumstances a good thing. There are many situations in which we need to be able to choose our company, and that need overrides any need to be “inclusive.” Women’s sport is definitely one of them.

Levels of testosterone, linked to muscle mass and increased strength, have been a key issue in debate over allowing trans athletes to compete in events consistent with their gender identity.

That’s the closest the article gets to admitting the difficulty, but look how careful it is not to spell it out – that this will mean a big advantage for male-bodied people and a big disadvantage for women, and that that seems pretty weird and unfair and anti-feminist given the fact that men are already dominant over women and we’ve been trying to level that out for quite a few decades now.

U Sports member institutions in B.C. include the University of B.C., University of Victoria, University of the Fraser Valley, Thompson Rivers University, University of Northern British Columbia, and Trinity Western University.

UBC released a statement saying it supports the policy.

“We are aware of other institutions where transgender athletes have wanted to play on the team that aligned with their gender identity, and we recognize that the situation could arise here,” said Gord Hopper, director of performance and team support for UBC Athletics.

“UBC supports inclusive and safe environments along with equal opportunities for all student-athletes.”

Well, then UBC has a problem, because this new policy is obviously in tension with equal opportunities for all student-athletes.

News from India Today:

An 18-year-old Muslim girl in Nawada district, Bihar was tied to a tree and caned by her family members for loving a Hindu boy. Her punishment was allegedly a result of the village panchayat’s diktat.

The incident happened on Wednesday (October 3) in Jogiya Maran village falling under Rajauli police station in Nawada. She remained tied to the tree for around five hours.

When she was being thrashed, no one came to her rescue.

Or while she stayed there tied to the tree for five hours either, apparently.

The two wanted to marry but her family was against it, so she ran away to his village.

The girl’s family came to know that she was with Kumar and soon went to his place to bring her back.

Thereafter, the panchayat was convened which directed the girl’s family to punish her for dishonouring the village. The girl was then tied to a tree and caned.

That will teach her to love the village and the people in it.

The president of the United States.

The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad. Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love! #Troublemakers

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2018

Anti-Semitic trope and personal targeting, from the president of the United States. Just another Friday.

Jack Holmes at Esquire:

Good Lord. He’s gone Full InfoWars. This appears to be first time the President of the United States has mentioned George Soros in a tweet, Soros being the legendary boogeyman for the right wing who supposedly funds any and every liberal protest, advertisement, campaign, and potluck. (Just this week, a writer with the National Review—considered a Very Serious right-wing publication—tried to link Kavanaugh accuser Deborah Ramirez to Soros. It turned out he was completely wrong and he had to apologize.) Soros does have some remarkable reach—he’s known for “breaking” the British pound and making $1 billion in a month off the deal—but this is just nonsense.

(Meanwhile, the Twitterati have already pointed out the bone-crushing hypocrisy here: that way back in 2015, Donald Trump’s campaign launch event—the one where he announced Mexico was sending criminals and “rapists” to our country, at least a year before most Beltway Pundits acknowledged he was a demagogue running on racial resentment—was full of actors he’d paid to be there. The anatomy of a scam.)

Meanwhile today’s vote is a yes on Kavanaugh.

https://twitter.com/B_Ehrenreich/status/1048234640434233348

It’s just so insulting.

https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/1047869765556097024

This process was rigged by Republicans from beginning to end 👇 https://t.co/e4mdbbpyyu

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) October 4, 2018

A distinguished Princeton Professor of Reformation History, Kenneth Appold, vividly recalls learning of the Deborah Ramirez Yale incident with his suitemate Brett Kavanaugh the day it happened. A real FBI inquiry would interview him, and nearly 40 others.https://t.co/CGBTLkN3XB

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) October 4, 2018

In less than a week, Trump and McConnell have managed to make a mockery of sex assault survivors, the Senate, the FBI, and the Supreme Court. This charade is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) October 4, 2018

Kavanaugh Yale suite mate now a theology professor says he heard at the time about Kavanaugh incident with Ramirez including their identities. He wasn’t interviewed by FBI. This is corroboration under any definition. How is this “thorough” @SenatorCollins? https://t.co/QuSxAZInxP

— Mimi Rocah (@Mimirocah1) October 4, 2018

I'm watching Senator McConnell's defense of Judge Kavanaugh, and truly, it's like reading 1984. The facts are not the facts. Don't trust what you saw and heard. Listen to & believe the party.

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) October 4, 2018

Not even a full week for an FBI investigation. A single copy of the report given to the Senate. Less than an hour to review. This is a complete sham. @SenateMajLdr McConnell said he’d plow Brett Kavanaugh through, and that’s exactly what the GOP is doing – no matter the cost.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) October 4, 2018

Adam Serwer on Trump’s theater of cruelty:

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.

Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

Well that’s Trump, isn’t it. That grab them by the pussy remark caused an explosive laugh in Billy Bush, as Trump meant it to. It’s funny to humiliate and shame women, because women are so weak and pathetic compared to men. It’s funny that Ford thinks Kavanaugh’s attack on her matters. It’s funny that women think they get a say.

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty towards women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt.

They bond over having it in common that they’re not women.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abusesuspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that they enjoy this cruelty, it is that they enjoy it with each other. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to each other, and to Trump.

…

Trump’s only true skill is the con, his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

You know Orwell’s “a boot stamping on a human face – forever”? Our version now is a mob of Trump fans in MAGA caps laughing – forever.