It’s the most conservative, farthest right Republicans who are pushing the impeachment of Rosenstein ploy, and what I’m wondering at the moment is what, exactly, is conservative about their lust to sabotage Mueller’s investigation.

After all, Mueller is a Republican, and a former Marine who fought in Vietnam, and a former head of the FBI. You would think all three of those descriptors would place him way the hell up there on the Conservative Checklist. Conservatives and Republicans generally favor other conservatives and Republicans, and men who enlisted voluntarily to fight in Vietnam, especially Marines. (I say “men” because the same doesn’t apply to women: conservatives and Republicans prefer the women to stay home and wait for their men to return.) As for the head of the FBI – come on now, you can’t get a better conservative Republican credential than that.

Yet these guys (I think they are all guys) who pride themselves on being to the right of most House Republicans (which makes them very far right indeed, do admit) are hell bent on discrediting Mueller and his investigation and the (Republican) Deputy Attorney General who is supervising both.

Why? What is conservative about that as a cause?

The explanation we see is entirely pragmatic – it’s worth it to them because Trump is destroying everything “liberal” he can get his hands on.

Maybe that’s all the explanation that’s needed, but it still niggles at me. Trump is a crook. He tells constant obvious lies. He’s mean. He fucks around and always has, including during all his marriages. He sexually assaults women and brags about it. He was a terrible father when his children were young. He hates our European allies and loves Russia. He’s a vulgar bullying asshole. You would think all those things would put extra-conservative conservatives way off, so way off that even the destruction of environmental and financial regulations wouldn’t be worth it.

It’s a puzzle; I guess I’ll just have to resign myself to not understanding it.

Act 732 of the melodrama:

Conservative lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a resolution calling for the impeachment of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, in a move that marks a dramatic escalation in the battle over the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The effort, spearheaded by Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), also sets up a showdown with House Republican leaders, who have distanced themselves from calls to remove Rosenstein from office. But Meadows and Jordan stopped short of forcing an immediate vote on the measure, sparing Republican lawmakers for now from a potential dilemma.

They used to be the lawnorder party, but now they’re the party of protect the sleazy corrupt rapey gangster from Queens from the FBI and law enforcement in general.

Meadows and Jordan are leaders of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, a bloc whose members have been among the most persistent critics of Rosenstein.

Because they’re to the right of everything. They’re the right wing of the right-wing Republicans, who are to the right of nearly everybody else on the planet. They’re so far to the right they’re coming back via the other side. Fire all the Attorneys General! Get rid of the investigators and prosecutors! Turn them all loose!

Not the peasants though. The Freedom Caucus doesn’t want them to have freedom. Life in prison for smoking a joint is good enough for them.

Steve Almond was doing a reading last week, and during the q and a afterwards a guy delivered an aria of rage about Hillary Clinton.

I thought about this guy as I watched a video clip of Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaking to a group of young conservatives on Tuesday. The high schoolers spontaneously start chanting “Lock her up” and Sessions — our nation’s top law enforcement official — repeats their words and chuckles fondly.

As you may remember, “Lock her up” was the central rallying cry at the Republican National Convention. Forget policy proposals aimed at helping working Americans, or hopeful slogans. Instead, the most salient message from one of our two major political parties was simply that the opposing candidate should be imprisoned.

At the time, I figured this chant was a way of unifying the party behind a divisive candidate, one who barely understood the precepts of traditional conservatism and who had few real policy positions.

Ah the luxury of being a man. I never figured that. I figured it was classic unhinged misogyny. Textbook. Unmistakable.

But as I listened Tuesday to the bellowing of those mostly male teenagers, something finally clicked in my mind: “Lock her up” isn’t really a political rallying cry. It’s an attempt to criminalize female ambition and autonomy.

Why yes, of course it is.

Mind you, I have the advantage of years of watching unhinged misogyny spraying itself all over Twitter and Facebook and blogs and other bits of the internet. I’ve had many thousands of lessons on the theme of “Enraged Hatred of Women Has Not Gone Away.”

I can hear now much more clearly, in this despotic chant, the desire to create a culture in which men have legal dominion over women and girls.

Sometimes this desire is overt. Women and girl migrants who come to America fleeing danger? Lock them up. Women who want to exercise their reproductive rights? Lock them up. Woman who dare to speak about sexual harassment and abuse? Well, if we can’t lock them up, we can at least shut them up.

And for an extra added bonus there’s the endless war on “TERFs.”

As the mid-term elections approach, you can be sure we’ll be seeing more Republican rallies, and hearing crowds roar “Lock her up.”

This speaks to the moral and intellectual poverty of the modern GOP, of course. But it also speaks to a vicious misogyny that extends far beyond an election. The “her” has become universal at this point.

If you’re a woman in America, they’re talking to you. They’re talking about locking you up.

I know. We know.

Trump and his pimps continue his war on the press.

The White House took retaliatory action against Kaitlan Collins, a White House reporter for CNN, after Collins asked President Trump questions at an Oval Office photo op on Wednesday.

Collins was representing all the television networks as the “pool reporter” in the room during the early afternoon meeting between Trump and Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission.

It is customary for the press pool to lob a few questions at the president. Sometimes Trump responds; other times he does not.

Collins asked him some questions about Putin and Cohen, and he didn’t answer. Later the White House told the press about an unexpected press availability with Trump and Juncker in the Rose Garden, open to all the press as opposed to the small pool.

A few minutes later, Collins was asked to come to Bill Shine’s office. Shine, a former co-president of Fox News, is the new deputy chief of staff for communications. Shine and press secretary Sarah Sanders met Collins there.

“They said ‘You are dis-invited from the press availability in the Rose Garden today,'” Collins said. “They said that the questions I asked were inappropriate for that venue. And they said I was shouting.”

There’s a clip that shows she was talking the way reporters generally do talk.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the matter.

In a statement, CNN disputed the White House’s assertion that Collins’ questions were inappropriate.

“Just because the White House is uncomfortable with a question regarding the news of day doesn’t mean the question isn’t relevant and shouldn’t be asked,” the network said. “This decision to bar a member of the press is retaliatory in nature and not indicative of an open and free press. We demand better.”

What Collins described — telling a well-known and well-respected reporter that she can’t attend a presidential event — is another serious escalation against the press by the Trump administration.

Reporters from the major networks take turns as the TV “pool reporter.” Wednesday happened to be CNN’s day.

On some days, there’s only one opportunity to ask the president questions.

So Collins felt she should ask about two of Wednesday’s biggest stories when journalists were let inside the Oval Office for a portion of Trump and Juncker’s meeting.

And the White House decided to punish her for that.

They’ll be arresting reporters for lèse-majesté soon at this rate.

Trump loses big: the emoluments case is going ahead.

This is the nightmare — or one of them — that Trump has long feared, namely litigation in which his business operations, perhaps even his tax returns, are laid bare. Norman Eisen, who is co-counsel with the District and Maryland, tells me, “It is another major crack in the dam that has so far been holding back accountability. [Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III] is closing in; [Michael] Cohen is about to cut a deal; and now we have taken another leap forward in being able to understand how Trump is profiting off the presidency, including possibly from Russia.” He adds, “‘Follow the money,’ the old adage goes, and we are going to do exactly that thanks to this decision.”

The decision, running over 50 pages, is an impressive, detailed analysis of the Constitution and 18th century language. This is a judge who did his homework. The ruling is the inevitable result of Trump’s decision to maintain ownership of his far-flung business operations and to continue to reap the benefits, foreign and domestic, resulting from his presidency.

Trump claims that “emoluments” means an exchange, like people stay in his hotel and he gives them Hawaii or something. The judge says nah.

Laurence Tribe, who along with Eisen has been making the emoluments argument in court and in the court of public opinion, says, “It’s an extremely significant ruling, the first federal judicial decision addressing — and endorsing — the theory we have been advancing on the Emoluments Clause ever since the start of the Trump administration.” On that, Trump would no doubt agree. You can be sure Trump will try to appeal the ruling.

And maybe he’ll explode with rage.

What actually happened with that transcript and video, according to Philip Bump in the Post:

Here’s the thing: That’s also how The Post’s transcript of the news conference initially read, too. Ours came from Bloomberg Government and ours, too, excluded the first part of the reporters question in which he begins, “President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election”.

What happened? If you watch the videos, it’s pretty clear. At some point in the middle of that question, there’s a switch between the feed from the reporters and the feed from the translator. In the White House version of the video, you can hear the question being asked very faintly under the woman who is translating saying “president.”

There are different versions and they vary depending on what was turned up or down in which ear piece…And yet, the Post has corrected its transcript but the White House has not corrected its.

The Guardian runs an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg from the parents of one of the children murdered at Sandy Hook:

Since that day, we, as well as the parents, family, and friends of the 25 other victims, have been embroiled in a constant battle with social media providers, including Facebook, to protect us from harassment and threats.

Almost immediately after the massacre of 20 little children, all under the age of seven, and six elementary school teachers and staff, the attacks on us began. Conspiracy groups and anti-government provocateurs began making claims on Facebook that the massacre was a hoax, that the murdered were so-called “crisis actors” and that their audience should rise up to “find out the truth” about our families. These claims and calls to action spread across Facebook like wildfire and, despite our pleas, were protected by Facebook.

While terms you use, like “fake news” or “fringe conspiracy groups”, sound relatively innocuous, let me provide you with some insight into the effects of allowing your platform to continue to be used as an instrument to disseminate hate. We have endured online, telephone, and in-person harassment, abuse, and death threats. In fact, one of the abusers was sentenced to jail for credible death threats that she admitted in court she had uttered because she believed in online content created by these “fringe groups”. In order to protect ourselves and our surviving children, we have had to relocate numerous times. These groups use social media, including Facebook, to “hunt” us, posting our home address and videos of our house online. We are currently living in hiding. We are far from alone in our experiences, as many other families who have lost loved ones in mass shootings and other tragedies have reported the same continuing torment.

Our families are in danger as a direct result of the hundreds of thousands of people who see and believe the lies and hate speech, which you have decided should be protected. What makes the entire situation all the more horrific is that we have had to wage an almost inconceivable battle with Facebook to provide us with the most basic of protections to remove the most offensive and incendiary content.

Facebook tells us things like that don’t violate its “community standards” – which makes one wonder very seriously about what “community” they have in mind.

In your recent interview with Kara Swisher of Recode, you were asked why Facebook would allow an organization to post a conspiracy theory claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged. While you implied that Facebook would act more quickly to take down harassment directed at Sandy Hook victims than, say, the posts of Holocaust deniers, that is not our experience. In fact, you went on to suggest that this type of content would continue to be protected and that your idea for combatting incendiary content was to provide counterpoints to push “fake news” lower in search results. Of course, this provides no protection to us at all. It would require people writing articles and making posts about our family and the massacre in the same quantity and read and spread by the same numbers as those who post and publish the hoax content. Since few are writing about a school shooting from six years ago, especially when other mass shootings have followed, only the Sandy Hook “hoax” information appears and is spread, giving increased credence to the hateful, dangerous content.

That “answer speech with speech” bromide drives me crazy. Do the people who trot it out so cheerfully not understand that sometimes – indeed, often – the bad speech wins? That people can – all too easily – be talked into anger and then hatred and then violence? That riots are a thing, massacres are a thing, genocide is a thing?

Facebook plays a mammoth role in exposing the world’s masses to information. That level of power comes with the tremendous responsibility of ensuring that your platform is not used to harm others or contribute to the proliferation of hate. Yet it appears that under the guise of free speech, you are prepared to give license to people who make it their purpose to do just that.

It more than appears; it is all too clear.

Jonathan Freedland points out how each new disclosure simply slides off Trump:

…late on Tuesday, the lawyer for Michael Cohen – Donald Trump’s personal attorney, fixer and keeper of his secrets – released a tape in which he and Trump are heard discussing how exactly to fund the silencing of a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal. Cohen apparently wanted it be handled legally, while Trump seemingly had other ideas.

“We’ll have to pay,” Cohen says. Trump’s reply: “Pay with cash.”

Put aside the impact an equivalent revelation about Clinton would have made in 1992. Just imagine the storm this would have caused if it had come out at the time Cohen and Trump had that conversation, just two months before the 2016 election. The entire political class would have assumed it would be devastating.

But now they know better, because nothing is devastating to Trump. There is a new story, there is outrage, then there’s a new story. It’s a pattern.

Note this month’s revelations by BBC’s Panorama programme that Trump behaved like a “predator” at parties packed with teenage girls in the 1980s and 1990s. It included the testimony of Barbara Pilling, then a young model, who recalled Trump asking her age. On hearing that she was 17, Trump said: “Oh, great. So you’re not too old and not too young. That’s just great.” Pilling added that she “felt I was in the presence of a shark”. Again, imagine what similar revelations would have done to the standing of Clinton or any previous president. Yet for Trump, they made barely a dent.

Grab one pussy, grab them all – what’s the difference?

For this reason, we shouldn’t be hoping the Mueller inquiry will make any difference.

Even if Mueller produces jaw-dropping evidence against Trump, the president’s base is unlikely to be impressed. For a flavour of the likely response, note Alex Jones’s latest Infowars broadcast, making the wild, evidence-free allegation that Mueller was involved in a child sex ring and fantasising about shooting Mueller. (Predictably, Facebook, which carries Infowars, said the broadcast did not breach its rules.)

We have to face the grim reality that in our post-2016 world few of the previous norms and standards apply. In Britain, too, we can see how things have changed. There was a time when a government admission that it was having to plan for the possibility that food and medicine would run out – not through natural disaster, but because of a policy it was pursuing – would have been terminal. Now it’s just another day in Brexit.

So that’s cheery.

Today Trump went to give the annual address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which is a thing presidents do.

“Don’t believe the crap you hear from these people — the fake news,” Trump told the crowd of veterans. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Raising the issue of immigration, Trump claimed many Democratic politicians are “disciples of a very low IQ person,” Rep. Maxine Waters, a frequent Democratic critic of the President’s. He also falsely accused Democrats of being “OK” with crime in the US.

“They want open borders, and crime’s OK,” Trump said. “We want strong borders and we want no crime.”

The usual vulgar lies and abuse, in short. Thanks for your service.

Oliver Burkeman explains how it can be true both that things are overall getting better and that we still run around with our hair on fire because of all the things that are getting worse. There’s this study…

In the experiment, participants were shown hundreds of dots in shades from deep purple to deep blue, and asked to say whether each was blue or not. Obviously, the bluer a dot, the more likely people were to classify it as blue. But what’s interesting is what happened when researchers began reducing the prevalence of the blue dots they displayed. The fewer dots that were objectively blue, the broader people’s definition of “blue” became: they started to classify purplish dots that way, too. Their concept of blue expanded, a phenomenon the study authors label “prevalence-induced concept change”. Which clearly has nothing to do with social problems such as poverty or racism – except that, actually, it might.

Of course it might…and that’s not even necessarily wrong (as he goes on to say). A social evil may be ameliorated but we still want to do more, and that’s a good thing. Yes, many Jim Crow laws were repealed, but there are still all those Confederate statues sending their messages about violent subordination of former slaves so let’s not quit yet ok?

But then again sometimes that finding The New Burning Injustice can get…warped.

It’s been argued that we live in an era of “concept creep”, in which concepts like “trauma” or “violence” have stretched to encompass things no previous generation would have worried about. Hence the idea that certain forms of speech are literally violence. Or that letting an eight-year-old walk to school alone is actual child neglect. Or – to pick an example from the current contentious debate over gender identity – that to question someone’s preferred explanation for their experience of gender is to deny their right to exist. Subsequent stages of the blue-dot study showed that prevalence-induced concept change affects this kind of issue, too. For instance, if you ask people to classify faces as threatening or non-threatening, then reduce the incidence of threatening ones, they’ll define more neutral faces as threatening. Ask them to classify research proposals as ethical or unethical, then reduce the unethical ones, and they’ll expand their definition of “unethical”. As co-author Dan Gilbert put it, “When problems become rare, we count more things as problems.”

Sometimes that’s a good thing, other times not so much. The expansion of human rights into the claim that one’s subjective ideas about oneself are both infallible and To Be Respected has a lot of absurd implications that bear no great resemblance to social justice.

The challenge when it comes to social problems – or your personal problems – is to ask whether the thing you’re worrying about is more like the former or the latter: a serious problem in its own right, or one you’ve essentially invented? If it feels like nothing’s improving, it might be because your brain keeps shifting the goalposts.

Exactly so.

Jeff Sessions decides that of all the things we have to worry about right now, the prospect of a generation of “supercilious sensitive snowflakes” is major enough that he should fret about it in a speech.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was speaking at an event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point USA on Tuesday when the crowd began to chant, “Lock her up.” The phrase was a common refrain among supporters of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and referred to the desired punishment for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Sessions, whose position advising that campaign was parlayed into one as the nation’s chief law enforcement official, chuckled.

Heh heh heh. Chuckle chuckle chuckle. These guys are such awesome comedians, aren’t they?

“Lock her up,” he said.

Sessions’s speech to TPUSA’s High School Leadership Summit was focused on the perceived rejection of free speech rights on college campuses, a favorite subject of TPUSA.

“Too many schools are coddling our young people and actively preventing them from scrutinizing the validity of their beliefs and the issues of the day,” he said. “That is the exact opposite of what we expect from universities in our country.”

Oh yes? What about the example set by his boss, then? Is he a model of scrutinizing the validity of one’s beliefs? Is he even a model of not brazenly lying to our faces multiple times every day? No he is not, so Jeff Sessions can just shut up forever about scrutinizing the validity of one’s beliefs.

“I can tell this group isn’t going to have to have Play-Doh when you get attacked in college and you get involved in a debate,” Sessions said. “You’re going to stand up and defend yourselves and the values that you believe in. I like this bunch, I can tell you. You’re not going to be backing down. Go get ’em! Go get ’em!”

The crowd, which had erupted into a “lock her up” chant earlier, began the chant again.

“Lock her up,” Sessions chuckled. The chants continued, and he added, “I heard that a long time over the last campaign.”

Wait, are we talking about scrutinizing the validity of one’s beliefs or are we talking about standing up and defending them? Are talking about questioning or are we talking about not backing down? And by the way, Jeff, how about scrutinizing the belief that Hillary Clinton should be “locked up” for bungling the issue of secure communications in a way that many people were doing at the time?

Bradley Moss at Lawfare on the taking away security clearances issue:

Trump is considering steps by which their clearances can be revoked because “they’ve politicized and, in some cases, monetized their public service and security clearances,” as well as “ma[de] baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia or being influenced by Russia against the President.” In 11 years of representing civilian employees, military personnel, political appointees and government contractors in security clearance proceedings, I can say with certainty that these types of “allegations” are nothing like anything I have ever seen in a memorandum outlining bases for denying or revoking a security clearance.

As usual with them, it’s not normal, but can they do it? It depends.

There’s a standard process for removing security clearances, which Trump is unlikely to use because “it affords far too much due process for his taste.” Yeah. He prefers to do things as summarily and dictatorially as he can get away with.

What’s more, it would require civil servants at the respective agencies to sign off on the paperwork. I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that those civil servants would not put their names on a document moving to revoke someone’s security clearance for nothing other than bad-mouthing the president on television or writing a book (both of which are protected activities under the First Amendment, assuming no classified information was disclosed—and there is no evidence that any was, despite complaints from the White House about Comey’s “leaking”).

There’s a national security exception but that would still involve current agency heads’ having to sign off on this “take it away because they say bad things about me” nonsense, and they probably wouldn’t do it.

That leaves the “because I said so” option.

The president could claim the inherent constitutional authority to revoke the clearance eligibility of each of the individuals without any due process. There is no precedent for such an action, as no president (at least as far as I am aware) has ever personally intervened in the clearance revocation (or approval) of an individual. That has never happened before because past presidents—whatever their flaws or scandals—knew there were certain institutional norms and customs that a president simply should not disturb.

Trump, though, is not burdened with an affinity for respecting institutional norms. He already bulldozed those norms when it came to hiring his daughter and son-in-law, refusing to place his assets in a blind trust, and refusing to disclose his tax returns. What is to stop him from running over another norm?

He sees it as part of his awesomeness that he bulldozes all the norms.

If the president were to take this unprecedented exercise of his authority, it is anyone’s guess how the courts would construe the issue. It would set up a serious clash of constitutional questions between the inherent authority of the president regarding classified information, the procedural due-process rights of clearance holders under the Fifth Amendment, and the extent to which the judiciary is even permitted to rule on the matter.

As the president would say, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Due process is for wimps; real men just issue orders.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on It’s the sense of entitlement.

Here are some more of those Trump voters we’re supposed to respect.

People who believe in a literal, physical hell and heaven, and speculate on what appliances they will have in their kitchen in heaven. (But I was assured that Gnu Atheists were arguing against a literal form of religion that nobody actually believes!)

People who dismiss Trump’s vileness on the grounds that “we are not to judge,” but claim that Hillary Clinton is “of Satan.”

People who believe Obama was a Muslim.

People who believe that the annihilation of Christians in America is nigh. (But don’t you dare call them delusional!)

People who believe that when Jesus said “love thy neighbor,” he meant “love thy American neighbor.”

People who believe that they can look around a hospital emergency room and figure out the immigration status of everyone there. (Gee, I wonder what basis they use?) People who are sure that hospital staff — for reasons unknown — are choosing to treat the illegal immigrants first and make Americans wait untreated.

People who think slavery wasn’t that bad — hey, the slaves were fed and clothed!

People who oppose having memorials to the victims of lynchings, because they’re afraid that African-Americans will be motivated to take revenge.

People who think that “Rosa Parks time” was “scary.”

But don’t you dare call them bigoted!

Originally a comment by Noxious Nan on It’s the sense of entitlement.

We’ve received the hard sell for accepting Trump voters as good people who were tired and wanted a change. It’s been such a hard sell, that I’ve really tried to visualize tolerant people driven to such a point that they would vote for Trump….It just doesn’t compute.

As someone defending these voters, Skeletor, please explain to me how it computes! Every line I try leads to eventual conscious racism or misogyny on the part of the imagined voter.

As a woman I experience misogyny every single day, albeit most of the time it is limited to small, subtle demonstrations and messages. These demonstrations come from loved ones almost as often as from anywhere else. It’s so goddamn disheartening that sometimes I just want to stop breathing! People I love voted for Trump. Nobody wants to go down this rabbit hole when this is about real people that we know and see and love every day, voting for someone who would have us live in the world Trump wants to create. It breaks my fucking heart!

They love me enough to tell me there are other reasons for that vote, like wanting a change, but that doesn’t distract me from the fact that they knew what it could do to me and millions of their fellow Americans. I’m not going to be quiet about that anymore. Maybe this happened because I was quiet and polite about it before it came to this.

Maybe I have to speak up every single goddamn time I am 2nd classed by family, friends and peers. I don’t even know if that’s possible. But I do know I’m done giving these people a pass, and I was done WHEN they voted for Trump. That was my apocalyptic alarm. That was the day they lost all benefit of the doubt that I ever had to give any of them, utterly and completely.

A disgusting display:

They will take their revenge on everyone if they can. We just have to hope they’ll be stopped in time.