Charles Pierce is blistering about the Republicans’ performance in that hearing yesterday.

Not one Republican asked a question about the specific offenses that Cohen had illuminated in his opening statement.

Why is that? I suppose because they don’t doubt any of it? But then why do they continue to support him? Because it’s worth it to them to stick it to women, stick it to the poor, stick it to brown immigrants, stick it to people of color generally.

And everybody kept yielding time to the egregious ranking Republican member, Jim Jordan of Ohio, or to Jordan’s fellow Freedom Caucasian, Mark Meadows of North Carolina, and those two jamokes couldn’t get out of their own way.

Jordan insisted that some dark—Dare he say, Clintonian?—forces were behind Cohen’s testimony, using the name of Lanny Davis, the old Clinton hand who is Cohen’s attorney, as a conjuring word. Jordan expressed surprise that Cohen might have consulted with the chairmen of other committees before which he might testify. He got so insufferable that Steve Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, went all Southie on Jordan’s mug, running through a litany of people connected with the Trump campaign and/or the administration* who have been arrested, indicted, convicted, or copped a plea.

Crime isn’t crime unless it happens in Chicago.

This was a vivid look into the chronic ward of the prion disease that has eaten away the higher functions of American conservatism—and, thus, those of the Republican Party as well—since Ronald Reagan first served up the monkey brains almost 40 years ago. These are the complete creatures of the talk-show culture, the perfect products of two and three generations of gerrymandered in-breeding. These are the monsters from inside The Bubble.

And the gerrymandering continues, so they will only get worse.

A theme emerges.

Difficult week for some members of the British left as it turns out Julie Bindel really is a feminist and Chris Williamson really is an antisemite, whoever could have guessed

— Sarah Ditum (@sarahditum) February 28, 2019

Now you people who want to no platform @bindelj take a long hard look at what she has achieved for women – Justice for Women – over her life time and tell what you have done that comes near it. Ta

— suzanne moore (@suzanne_moore) February 28, 2019

To all those whoever wondered, 'Gosh, what has @bindelj ever done for women in prison?", and couldn't research it because their Googling finger was broken, start here and work backwards over 3 decades. Yes @bindelj and @HWistrich! Ultimate power couple https://t.co/WnZhnIeDX9

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) February 28, 2019

When people say "what has Julie Bindel ever done for women in prison" – her tireless and fearless campaigning for women is humbling. https://t.co/etz11iLvn0

— sianushka (@sianushka) February 28, 2019

That’s one way of putting it.

Across the U.S. and in many places abroad, transgender athletes are breaking barriers in high school, college and pro sports and being embraced by teammates and fans. But resentments can still flare when transgender women start winning and dominating their sport.

Well now what do we mean by “barriers”? Not all barriers need breaking. If you have a barrier between you and the local grizzly bears, you don’t much want it broken, do you.

And they’re not really breaking “barriers” anyway, because there are no “barriers” labeled “No Trans People Allowed.” What they’re doing is breaking the rules, which doesn’t sound quite so progressive. People with male bodies are breaking the rules to play against women and girls, leaving a little heap of injured women and girls in their wake.

Transgender cyclist Rachel McKinnon holds hands with Carolien Van Herrikhuyzen during the UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships in Carson, California, in 2018.Craig Huffman / via AP file

So touching and adorable, but look how massive McKinnon is next to Van Herrikhuyzen. Maybe not really so adorable after all. McKinnon is looking down at her as if she’s a puppy.

The AP solicited and received a comment from McKinnon, then went on to accuse women who want to compete against women of “vitriol.”

Helen Carroll, a longtime college athletic director, basketball coach and LGBTQ-rights activist, said many trans women athletes train extra hard to offset hormone treatment and face undeserved skepticism when they excel.

“As long as trans people are losing and are not the best, everything is OK,” Carroll said. “As soon as they start winning, that’s when the vitriol comes out about how they’re really still a man.”

The vitriol can surface even at the high school level. In the track and field community in Connecticut, the dominance of transgender girl sprinters Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood has stirred resentment among some competitors and their families.

Yes, and? Why shouldn’t it?

The AP never manages to explain.

Another Pronouns War:

A debate about the gender identity of Dr James Barry, the pioneering Victorian who adopted a male persona to become the UK’s first female-born doctor, has erupted after the award-winning author EJ Levy was accused of disrespecting Barry’s legacy by using female pronouns in a forthcoming novel.

Levy announced last week that she had sold a novel about the “true story” of Barry, titled The Cape Doctor. The forthcoming book, which will be released by Little, Brown, will trace Barry’s life story: born Margaret Ann Bulkley in Ireland, the future doctor became Barry at the age of 20 and left for Edinburgh to study medicine as a man. Barry joined the army after graduation, the start of a distinguished career as a military surgeon that spanned Cape Town, St Helena and Trinidad and Tobago. In 1865, Barry returned to the UK with dysentery, and died. A maid discovered the doctor’s biological gender after the death.

When Levy, winner of the Flannery O’Connor award, announced the news of her novel by describing Barry as “a heroine for our time, for all time”, other authors began to question Levy’s reference to Barry as “she”, including novelist Celeste Ng, who told Levy: “I’m now seeing you use she/her pronouns for Barry even as many are telling you Barry himself used and wanted he/him pronouns. I hope you and L,B will listen to these concerns and take them into account.”

But Barry “used and wanted he/him pronouns” at a time when people with she/her pronouns were not welcome to study medicine in Edinburgh and become doctors, and then to practice medicine. There were a few pioneers but it was a very uphill battle. Given that, we can’t know whether Barry really “wanted” male pronouns or simply resorted to them in order to get the freedom and the work she/he wanted to do.  Barry didn’t leave a collection of tweets taking a position on pronouns.

Barry’s gender identity has been overwhelmingly framed as female by writers over the past 150 years, said Cardiff University professor Ann Heilmann, author of Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre, exceptions being Patricia Duncker’s 1999 novel James Miranda Barry and Rachel Holmes’s 2002 biography The Secret Life of Dr James Barry.

…

“While I understand that emotions run very high (understandably so, given the difficulties trans people face and in light of ongoing tensions between feminism and the trans community), I don’t think that Barry can be that easily mapped on to contemporary trans thought,” she said. “Though of course there have always been trans people, the lived and felt gender identity of an 18th and early 19th-century person would have been very different from our contemporary identity politics.”

And that person would not have called it a “gender identity” or understood what you were talking about if you used it.

Jeremy Dronfield, co-author of Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time, said: “In my biography, I used male pronouns for Barry. He was, at least outwardly, a man. But whether Barry qualifies as transgender in modern terms is complicated. When Margaret became James, it wasn’t primarily because she wanted to be a man. She wanted to live the kind of life which in 1809 was impossible for a woman. Once the persona had served its purpose, Margaret intended to discard it. Circumstances prevented that. There’s evidence that Barry missed being a woman. But we also know that he relished being a man, his behaviour exceeding what was necessary for disguise. However, the claim made online that Barry left a will asking to be remembered as a man is false. He left no statement of identity.

“If Margaret had been born in 1989 instead of 1789, free to be a surgeon and soldier, would she have chosen to become a man? On balance, I don’t think so, but Margaret might have identified as non-binary. I have no argument with seeing James Barry as a transgender icon, or Margaret as a feminist role model. I do take issue with those who insist on recognising one and erasing the other.”

And bullying people who refuse to comply.

Ok the Republicans are the minority and they’re hostile, while the Democrats are the majority and…not friendly, not affectionate, but not hostile in the sense of hostile to Cohen’s presence and testimony. Grant all that. It’s Democrats versus Republicans, with all that follows from that.

But if the two were reversed would Democrats be this assholish? This challenging, this stern, yes, but it’s more than that – there’s also taunting, sneering, raging, screeching. Do Republicans give themselves permission to be Trump-like in the era of Trump in a way they wouldn’t have before?

Update: Rep. Carol Miller, R-West Virginia, thinks it’s “a game” to establish whether or not Trump is a criminal.

It’s not a game, Representative Miller. It couldn’t possibly be more serious.

Update: Oh, Miller is angry that they have postponed hearings on child separation to do this one. Well who does she think is behind the child separation policy?!

Maybe this answers my question about would the Democrats carry on so grotesquely if they were in the hot seat.

https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/1100824186182881283

Good lord.

Hey @MichaelCohen212 – Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) February 26, 2019

I seem to follow a lot of lawyers.

See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1512(b), 1515(a)(1)(B).

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) February 26, 2019

1st q asked by @NicolleDWallace about this despicable tweet was "is this illegal?" Answer is it's likely witness threat, but q should be why is MOC allowed to act this way even if it wasn't a crime.

— Jill Wine-Banks (@JillWineBanks) February 26, 2019

Aaron Blake at the Post:

A Republican member of Congress on Tuesday suggested without evidence that Michael Cohen engaged in affairs with multiple “girlfriends” and suggested his wife might cheat on him while he’s in prison — all on the eve of Cohen’s public testimony.

President Trump and his allies have camped out in a whole host of gray areas when it comes to obstruction of justice and witness tampering over the last two years. But this one from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) doesn’t appear to be nearly so gray.

…

We’re about to find out what Mueller’s thresholds are for obstruction of justice and witness tampering. But whatever they are, Trump is insulated because Justice Department rules say a sitting president can’t be indicted. That means Congress is the arbiter, and even if Trump would be convicted of witness tampering in a court of law, he could survive.

But Gaetz has no such insulation, and you can make a pretty convincing argument that his witness-related tweet is far less veiled that Trump’s have ever have been.

I wonder what he hopes to get out of it.

Trump told an audience of governors yesterday that Princess Ivanka has created millions of jobs. Of course she hasn’t. She and Daddy got some corporations to sign something saying they would offer lots of training – but they were doing that anyway, and signing something isn’t the same as actual jobs. Daddy was telling a whopper as usual.

In July of last year, Trump signed an executive order creating the National Council for the American Worker, co-chaired by Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. One of the council’s priorities is asking companies across the US to sign the Pledge to America’s Workers. The pledge involves “committing to expand programs that educate, train, and reskill American workers from high-school age to near-retirement,” according to the White House.

Two hundred companies have agreed to the pledge, with each providing different numbers of training opportunities. This brings the total number of opportunities pledged to just over 6.5 million. (See the full list.)

Programs that educate, train, and reskill≠jobs.

First, the pledge does not translate to millions of immediate training opportunities. In a press release from the administration, the pledge is described as a commitment to “new opportunities over the next five years.”

Secondly, these are better understood as training opportunities, not necessarily “jobs.” In the same press release last year, the White House described these opportunities as “apprenticeships and work-based learning, continuing education, on-the-job training, and reskilling.” These opportunities can be for current employees.

Lastly, many of these opportunities pledged were already planned by the companies. As CNN previously reported, Walmart’s pledged amount over five years would just about match the rate that its program Walmart Academies has trained since it started in 2016. The Associated Builders and Contractors provides a similar example as it pledged to provide roughly as many opportunities in five years as it trains in one year.

Oh that’s where all the anti-vaxxing is coming from.

In 2008, Vaccinate Your Family, the nation’s largest nonprofit dedicated to advocating for vaccinations, had to stop posting videos to YouTube.

Then known as Every Child By Two, the organization had used its channel on the massive video platform to post interviews with doctors, public service announcements and testimonials from parents of children who had died of vaccine-preventable diseases.

But those messages were quickly sabotaged. YouTube’s recommendation system, which appears alongside videos and suggests what users should watch next, would direct viewers to anti-vaccination videos, according to Amy Pisani, executive director of Vaccinate Your Family.

Yes, it’s The American Way. You’ve read /listened to /watched something reasonable and evidence-based, now wouldn’t you like to read or watch something cracked and evidence-free and just made up out of somebody’s empty head? Of course you would! Here are four to choose from.

Pisani’s story offers a window into the struggle that public health officials and advocates face as they attempt to provide information on vaccinations on social media, where anti-vaccination proponents have spent more than a decade building audiences and developing strategies that ensure they appear high in search results and automated recommendations.

Because when in doubt, try to get epidemics going again!

After more than a decade and facing mounting pressure, YouTube announced a change in its recommendation algorithm this month, saying it would stop suggesting conspiracy videos like the ones that followed Vaccinate Your Family’s. YouTube also stopped some anti-vaccine videos from showing ads and earning money, and started providing more information about the threat of vaccine hesitancy in a window below anti-vaccine videos.

In a statement to NBC News, a YouTube spokesman called misinformation around medical topics “a difficult challenge,” and referred to their recent policy changes, adding, “like many algorithmic changes, these efforts will be gradual and will get more and more accurate over time.”

No worries. It’s not as avoiding epidemics is a big deal or anything.

And on social media, the anti-vaccination proponents seem to be winning.

Vaccinate Your Family’s Facebook page has nearly 200,000 likes and followers, but nowhere near the visibility or engagement of anti-vaccine pages and private groups, where hundreds of thousands of users post articles from fringe health websites, trade tips on avoiding state-mandated vaccinations, and share memes bashing parents who vaccinate.

But Team Anti-epidemics is getting better at pushing back.

Stephan Neidenbach, 38, a middle-school technology teacher from Annapolis, Maryland, runs “We Love GMOs and Vaccines,” a Facebook page he started in 2014, he said, to combat growing misinformation on Facebook.

At first Neidenbach said he was just anonymously replying to anti-vaccine content, but soon scientists, farmers and doctors started following the page and sharing.

The page — now with with 194,000 followers — is one of several on Facebook that respond directly and in-kind to anti-vaccination pages. Users share news reports about vaccine outbreaks, and post memes and screenshots of posts from anti-vaccine groups, which they ridicule in the comments.

One recent post read, “If you’re antivaxx and you see me making fun of antivaxx people, I just want to say that I am talking about you personally and I hope you’re offended because you’re fucking stupid.”

“That’s what separates me from other organizations,” Neidenbach said. “I’m not an organization, and I’m not trying to run a nonprofit. I’m just a school teacher. And I don’t have to be as nice as I do in the classroom.”

“They have to worry about being professional,” he said. “But we can do more inflammatory stuff that the World Health organization can’t do. And the inflammatory stuff, as you can tell by the anti-vaxxers, does well on Facebook.”

When it’s anti-epidemic it’s in a good cause.

I wrote a thing for The Freethinker about the ludicrous arguments the pope has to resort to when he and his cronies gather to talk about the long history of child-rape by priests.

So now that we’re properly cowed and humbled by the Procession of Ecclesiastical Nomenclature, let’s look at how Frank presents this worrying puzzle of how Mister God let all this rape of children by priests go on for decades and, it seems safe to assume, centuries.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

As I thank the Lord who has accompanied us during these days, I would like to thank all of you for the ecclesial spirit and concrete commitment that you have so generously demonstrated.

Problem. We have a problem already. It’s sweet that the Lord accompanied them during those days, but where was the Lord the rest of the time? Where was the Lord during all those rapes of children? If the Lord accompanies them now as they try to deal with the fact that they can’t hide the rapes any longer, why didn’t the Lord accompany them as they pulled down the children’s pants?

It’s a trick question, I suppose. The Lord wasn’t anywhere, because the Lord is a fictional character that the church makes its living from.

You could take it metaphorically though. “The Lord”=their consciences, their compassion, their inner resistance to causing pain and fear and distress to other people, especially people too young and small and unformed to resist. Where was that “the Lord” when they pulled down the children’s pants?

In some cases, maybe many, that Lord too was nowhere, because the priests in question became priests precisely because it was such an excellent setup for raping children. Conscience and compassion were never in the picture.

But Frank can’t admit that, can he.

There’s a lot that Frank can’t admit.

Glinner (Graham Linehan) is seeking anecdotes.

I'd like to collect some anecdotes about when and why you first became involved in the debate about gender ideology/activism. If you don’t feel you can talk about it, you can simply say that. Otherwise, I’d like to hear your stories.

— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) February 26, 2019

Lots of interesting replies, as you’d expect.

When women were told to stop talking about their periods or pregnancies because "not all women" can have either of those things.

— Carrie (@polskibyproxy) February 26, 2019

I recognize that one! In my case it was abortion rights, and my response was No. PZ’s goon squad took copious notes.

For me it was your posts, together with @lecanardnoir and @zeno001 (the three of you had always posted sensible stuff) that made me start properly thinking about this, and it just suddenly clicked, how absurd some of this whole ideology was…

— crispis (@DelcCris) February 26, 2019

Sweaters for elephants. That’s right, sweaters for elephants.

Winters get chilly in Northern India, so volunteers at the the Wildlife SOS Elephant Conservation and Care Center decided to knit giant sweaters for its rescued elephants.

It takes around 4 weeks to make one sweater, and it does not come as a surprise knowing that elephants are the largest land mammals on the planet. Still, the volunteers make sure that the knits are not only warm and cozy, they are also colorful , and even fashionable.

I hope they’re also washable, because elephants love coating themselves with dirt.

“It is important to keep our elephants protected from the bitter cold during this extreme winter, as they are weak and vulnerable having suffered so much abuse making them susceptible to ailments such as pneumonia,” cofounder Kartick Satyanarayan said in a release. “The cold also aggravates their arthritis which is a common issue that our rescued elephants have to deal with.” Thank goodness the abuse those sweet babies had to face is in the past, with bright – and stylish – future ahead of them.

They look pretty happy about it.

H/t James