The BBC yesterday:

The Australian Football League (AFL) has agreed for the first time to allow a transgender footballer to play women’s football at state level.

Hannah Mouncey, 28, who previously played at local level in Canberra, hopes to take to the field in the state of Victoria this season.

The AFL said it wanted everyone to be able to play Australian rules football.

Before she began her gender transition in 2015, Mouncey played for the Australian men’s handball team.

The AFL’s decision means she can now partake in any of its affiliated state leagues during the 2018 season.

…

Australian rules football consists of two teams of 18 players and takes place on an oval-shaped field.

Players can position themselves anywhere on the field and may use any part of their bodies to move the ball, making it a more physical-contact sport, more similar to rugby.

Rugby is like US football, a full-contact sport, and very violent. Hannah Mouncey is 6’3″ and 220 pounds.

Garrett Epps on widening contempt for the rule of law in the US such as for instance

the litigation tactic adopted by Michael Turzai and Joseph Scarnati, two Republicans who are respectively the speaker of the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives and the President of the Pennsylvania State Senate, in an emergency stay application filed with Justice Samuel Alito. The application asked Alito to block a decision of Pennsylvania’s State Supreme Court. That decision—rendered as an order on January 22 and explained in a lengthy opinion on Thursday—invalidated the system of U.S. House districts approved by the Republican legislature for election of members of the U.S. House next fall.

The state court held that the partisan nature of the district plan violated the Pennsylvania Constitution’s requirement of “free and equal” elections. The court ordered the legislature to draw up a new congressional district plan in time for the congressional elections this November.

Federal courts have no authority to overrule a state’s Supreme Court about what that state’s constitution means, Epps says, but Turzai and Scarnati asked anyway, because they really really wanted to. Alito said nah without even passing the request on to the full court.

Astonishingly, as Alito was pondering the request to throw the U.S. Supreme Court under the bus, Senate President Scarnati was also informing the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that he had no intention of obeying its stupid order anyway. “In light of the unconstitutionality of the Court’s Orders and the Court’s plain intent to usurp the General Assembly’s constitutionally delegated role of drafting Pennsylvania’s congressional districting plan,” Scarnati’s lawyer wrote to the Pennsylvania justices, “Senator Scarnati will not be turning over any data identified in the Court’s Orders.”

Appellate lawyers generally consider “I don’t have to obey no stinking order” a high-risk argument strategy. It tends to leave any judge with an ever-so-slightly jaundiced view of the party invoking it.

Maybe the plan is to imprison all the judges? Or kill them? Sounds a bit Pakistan-like, but that’s what happens when contempt for the law spreads.

Pennsylvania Republicans are doing their best to render the Pennsylvania Supreme Court powerless.

In short, Pennsylvania is in the middle of a state constitutional crisis, and one side of the dispute is willing to threaten the independence of the state’s courts for the chance at six extra House seats.

Readers in North Carolina may find the fracas oddly familiar-sounding. After Republicans gained control of the legislature there in 2011, state courts blocked a number of their conservative innovations, including an attempt to abolish teacher tenure and a measure to bar the state’s Democratic governor from appointing a majority on local election boards.

The Republican legislative majority struck back. It has done away with the state’s public financing system for judicial elections (thus making candidates dependent on big donors), and has voted to require every judicial candidate to run under a partisan label (thus making judges explicitly partisan). It also abolished the party primaries for judicial office—meaning that incumbents would face multiple challengers rather than one strong one. When vacancies occurred on the state court of appeals, legislators “unpacked” the court, abolishing the open seats, to prevent the Democratic governor from appointing new judges.

The Republicans then offered redrawn judicial district maps that would have made the bench radically whiter and redder. When these ran into heavy weather, they canceled this year’s judicial elections altogether. They proposed making every judge run for re-election every two years. They are now mulling a plan to abolish judicial elections altogether, so that the legislative majority can name an all-Republican pool of candidates for every judgeship in the state. In other words, one way or another, the state courts are to be annexed to the power of the Republican legislative majority.

Scary enough yet?

And speaking of trying to slash budgets for everything that’s not weapons or presidential travel while also pissing it away on graft and trumpian whims – Donnie’s Excellent Parade will cost between 10 and 30 million.

Trump’s military parade would cost between $10 million and $30 million, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said on Wednesday.

Mulvaney offered the estimate during questioning at the House Budget Committee. He said the White House hasn’t yet budgeted for the parade and would either rely on Congress to appropriate funds, or use money that already has been approved.

“The estimates I’ve seen, they’re very preliminary, is between 10 [million dollars] and 30 [million dollars] depending upon the length,” Mulvaney said. “Obviously an hour parade is different from a five-hour parade in terms of the cost and the equipment and those types of things.”

Trump’s proposed budget (which mercifully won’t get through Congress) slashes science and the arts and humanities, while in another part of the forest his hires steal public money in every creative way they can think of. The latest example:

Veterans Affairs Secretary David J. Shulkin’s chief of staff doctored an email and made false statements to create a pretext for taxpayers to cover expenses for the secretary’s wife on a 10-day trip to Europe last summer, the agency’s inspector general has found.

Vivieca Wright Simpson, VA’s third-most senior official, altered language in an email from an aide coordinating the trip to make it appear that Shulkin was receiving an award from the Danish government — then used the award to justify paying for his wife’s travel, Inspector General Michael J. Missal said in a report released Wednesday. VA paid more than $4,300 for her airfare.

The account of how the government paid travel expenses for the secretary’s wife is one finding in an unsparing investigation that concluded that Shulkin and his staff misled agency ethics officials and the public about key details of the trip. Shulkin also improperly accepted a gift of sought-after tickets to a Wimbledon tennis match, the investigation found, and directed an aide coordinating the trip to act as what the report called a “personal travel concierge” to him and his wife.

The Secretary and his delegation’s three and a half days of meetings in Copenhagen and London  cost $122,334 and the inspector general doesn’t know exactly how much of that was stolen for personal use, but it’s not lunch money.

Shulkin is one of five current and former Trump administration Cabinet members under investigation by agency inspectors general over their travel expenses, an issue that forced Tom Price to resign as Health and Human Services secretary in the fall.

Not that it’s a pattern or anything.

Oh gee, poor White House, they’re all in a mess again because of Porter and Wray and why won’t it just stop? All they want is to be left in peace to take away Medicare and Medicaid and subsidies for health insurance and the EPA and food stamps and a few other tiny things.

The White House struggled Tuesday to contain a widening crisis over its handling of domestic violence allegations against a senior official, as it reeled from sworn testimony by the FBI chief that directly contradicted what President Trump’s aides had presented as the official version of events.

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the bureau had completed a background report on then-staff secretary Rob Porter last July and closed out the case entirely last month. Wray’s account is at odds with White House claims that the investigation required for Porter’s security clearance was “ongoing” until he left his job last week, after his two ex-wives publicly alleged physical and emotional abuse.

So they lied, so what? Won’t somebody please think of the billionaires?

The latest bout of turbulence is exacerbated by the administration’s reputation, earned over 13 chaotic months, for flouting institutional norms and misrepresenting facts to the public — a culture set by the president himself.

The public relations fallout is further compounded by Trump’s own history of alleged sexual assault and his seeming reluctance to publicly condemn violence against women and give voice to the national #MeToo reckoning.

But other than that, why does anybody care?

Trump is playing it cool when we can see him but behind the scenes he’s asking everybody what the media are saying and how this is all working out for him.

People are super annoyed at Kelly.

Kelly is “a big fat liar,” said one White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a candid opinion.

Hahahahahahaha “I’ll tell you what I think of Kelly if you promise to keep my name out of it, ok? Cool. He’s A BIG FAT LIAR. Don’t say it was me.”

Kelly’s attempts at explaining his role, according to some aides, have included telling senior staff members last Friday to communicate a version of events many believed to be false, as well as telling at least one confidant that he has “a good bullshit detector” and had long detected troubling characteristics in Porter.

If he had a good bullshit detector he wouldn’t be working for Mister Bullshit himself.

“Credibility is the coin of the realm for any White House chief of staff, and it’s especially important in a White House where truth was the first casualty and credibility has been the second,” said Chris Whipple, who wrote a book about chiefs of staff.

The internal animus is not limited to Kelly. White House counsel Donald McGahn and deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin are also facing scrutiny over how Porter managed to work at the White House — and hold an interim security clearance — for more than a year despite the allegations of abuse during his two marriages.

It’s my impression that the security clearance is actually supposed to mean something, and that people who can’t get one aren’t supposed to have the job where you hand the president all the secret briefings.

During Wray’s testimony, another White House aide texted a Washington Post reporter, describing the moment as “a killer.”

When asked if Kelly could have been more transparent or truthful, that official wrote: “In this White House, it’s simply not in our DNA. Truthful and transparent is great, but we don’t even have a coherent strategy to obfuscate.”

Ahem. Let’s repeat that.

When asked if Kelly could have been more transparent or truthful, that official wrote: “In this White House, it’s simply not in our DNA. Truthful and transparent is great, but we don’t even have a coherent strategy to obfuscate.”

That’s quite an admission.

One of Trump’s new besties is a decidedly overt racist. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports:

A Republican challenger to U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan drew international criticism over the weekend for tweeting an image that replaced the mixed-race fiancée of Prince Harry with a dark-skinned prehistoric Briton known as “Cheddar Man.”

As of Sunday afternoon, Paul Nehlen’s Twitter account had been suspended.

The provocation is only the latest for Nehlen, an outrage artist who has used this technique to help his campaign raise funds and in turn pay his wife a salary. Last month, Nehlen drew criticism for making anti-Semitic tweets and then posting the contact information of ordinary citizens who called and emailed to berate him.

In a tweet late Friday, Nehlen shared an image of the royal couple in which a scientific reconstruction of Cheddar Man’s face is superimposed over the features of the actress Meghan Markle standing beside her fiancé, the prince.

“Honey, does this tie make my face look pale?” Nehlen tweeted along with the image, which the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is not sharing.

But Matt McDermott did share it, which is how I saw it and was inspired to look for news on it.

Barack Obama was in the same room as Louis Farrakhan once and it caused a decades-long controversy.

Donald Trump gave a shoutout to white supremacist Paul Nehlen, Republican running for Congress, and nary a mention. pic.twitter.com/EVNsItEtoJ

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) February 11, 2018

The times we live in.

The British newspaper The Mirror decried the “racist tweet” in a headline, saying that Markle has been subjected to racial abuse since the royal engagement was announced. The Mirror quoted Markle’s co-star, actor Patrick J. Adams.

“You’re a sad and sick man with no sense of shame or class,” Adams said to Nehlen. “Get a life. And don’t go anywhere near MM – she’s got more power, strength, honor and compassion in her fingernail than you’ll ever know in this lifetime. Way above your weight class.”

But he’s Trump’s li’l buddy.

The awfulness of Sarah Sanders.

She dripped disdain.

She oozed contempt.

“If you were paying attention to what I just read to you . . .” she huffed, like an exasperated teacher reprimanding a classroom troublemaker.

No, worse than that, really. More like an angry prison guard. That horrible scowl of hers goes way beyond exasperated.

Watching the press secretary at Monday’s briefing, the words that came to mind were these: A new low.

Yes, a new rock-bottom from the podium at the Trump White House press briefing.

And that is really saying something, given the lying-from-day-one reign of Sean Spicer, along with Sanders’s own fulsome history of dissembling, and the 10-day flameout of Anthony Scaramucci last summer.

Not fulsome; that’s the wrong word. Extensive, packed, overfull – she dissembles a lot.

You might think that as one of the most visible women in the Trump administration, Sanders would bring some credibility — maybe even sympathy — to bear on subjects related to respect for women.

Well, no, because if she had that in her she wouldn’t be doing that job.

In fact, it seems to bring out the worst in her.

For Jay Rosen, New York University journalism professor, this is another reason to “send the interns.” The press briefings are so devoid of substance, so predictably filled with lies, that they aren’t a valid use of top reporters’ time.

Monday’s performance once again fulfilled what he tweeted was the “brand promise” of the Trump administration when dealing with the press: “Watch: we will put these people down for you.”

Really? Sarah Huckabee Sanders is criticizing Nancy Pelosi's facial expressions? Look in the mirror! #hypocrisy #SarahHuckabeeSanders #NancyPelosi #potcallingthekettleblack #scowling #PelosiFrowns #frowngate #pettywoman pic.twitter.com/YaeqZHknJI

— Shari Mathias (@sharimathias) January 31, 2018

https://twitter.com/dodo/status/963186469526413312

NBC News offers some explanation of why Rachel Brand has quit her job.

The Justice Department’s No. 3 attorney had been unhappy with her job for months before the department announced her departure on Friday, according to multiple sources close to Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand.

Brand grew frustrated by vacancies at the department and feared she would be asked to oversee the Russia investigation, the sources said.

The sources say the WalMart job had been in the works for some time.

As far back as last fall, Brand had expressed to friends that she felt overwhelmed and unsupported in her job, especially as many key positions under her jurisdiction had still not been filled with permanent, Senate-confirmed officials.

Four of the 13 divisions overseen by the associate attorney general remain unfilled, including the civil rights division and the civil division, over one year into the Trump administration.

Only one man matters.

While Brand has largely stayed out of the spotlight, public criticism of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein by President Donald Trump worried Brand that Rosenstein’s job could be in danger.

Should Rosenstein be fired, Brand would be next in line to oversee Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, thrusting her into a political spotlight that Brand told friends she did not want to enter.

A spokeswoman for the DoJ said none of it is true. We believe everything they say, yes? No.