A pointed rebuke

May 11th, 2017 10:37 am | By

Awkward for Donald: the acting director of the FBI says Donald’s claim that the agents didn’t love Comey any more is Not True. So much of what Donald says is Not True.

McCabe is testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee right now.

Mr. McCabe rejected the White House’s assertion that Mr. Comey had lost the backing of rank-and-file F.B.I. agents, a pointed rebuke of what had been one of the president’s main defenses for the move.

“Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the F.B.I. and still does to this day,” Mr. McCabe said at the hearing.

“The vast majority of F.B.I. employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey,” he added.

But but but but the president said…

Mr. McCabe also said that the Justice Department’s investigation into whether any Trump associates colluded with Russia in the presidential election was “highly significant,” another direct contradiction of the White House.

A day earlier, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, trying to parry accusations that Mr. Comey’s firing was related to the Russia inquiry, called it “probably one of the smallest things that they’ve got going on their plate” at the F.B.I.

Yeah, it would be, wouldn’t it. A hostile foreign power interfering in a presidential election? Pfff, small potatoes; nobody cares about that.

Mr. McCabe was also adamant that the firing of Mr. Comey had not affected the investigation.

“The work of the men and women of the F.B.I. continues despite any changes in circumstances,” he said in response to a question from Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. “There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date. Simply put, you cannot stop the men and women of the F.B.I. from doing the right thing.”

It’s comforting to remember that Deep Throat was the Deputy Director of the FBI.

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Voter suppression time

May 11th, 2017 10:22 am | By

The Times reports:

President Trump plans to name Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has pressed for aggressive measures to crack down on undocumented immigrants, to a long-promised commission to investigate voting fraud in the United States, a White House official said Thursday.

The commission is the official follow-through on Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that several million “illegals” voted for his Democratic rival and robbed him of a victory in the national popular vote.

An unsubstantiated claim of that kind is more properly called a lie, especially when it’s made with malice by a sitting president. Trump just makes shit up, and since he’s not six years old and not talking about pixies in the garden, that is lying.

Mr. Kobach, who has championed the strictest voter identification laws in the country, will be the vice chairman of the commission, which is to be led by Vice President Mike Pence and is expected to include about a dozen others, including state officials from both political parties, the official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to detail an announcement expected later Thursday.

We know how this will go. They will cook the books and use the books as a reason to make voting ever more difficult. The more difficult it is to vote, the fewer disadvantaged people are able to vote, because of the disadvantages. If voting takes place in few locations and during working hours and with burdensome requirements for layers of identification, then fewer poor people will be able to vote. They’re basically doing everything they can to make sure most people who vote Democratic can’t vote.

Mr. Kobach has been the driving force behind a Kansas law requiring new voters to produce a passport, a birth certificate or naturalization papers as proof of citizenship or be denied the ability to cast ballots. He worked last year to disqualify the state and local votes of thousands of people who did not meet the criteria. He has advocated the proof-of-citizenship requirement at the federal level as well, citing rampant voter fraud without producing proof of a widespread problem.

“Kris Kobach being named to run a commission on ‘voter integrity’ is like naming Bernie Madoff to run a commission on financial crimes,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice Education Fund. “He has dedicated his professional career to trying to deny people of color the vote and to trying to drive millions of immigrants out of the country.”

…

Civil rights groups also reacted with alarm to the impending creation of the task force, arguing that Mr. Trump’s own comments about illegal voting by immigrants suggested that his intent was to work to restrict the voting rights of minorities.

Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called the commission “a thinly veiled voter suppression task force,” adding that it was “designed to impugn the integrity of African-American and Latino participation in the political process.”

If they would only learn to vote Republican Trump would be more understanding.

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can we get this person fired

May 11th, 2017 9:35 am | By
can we get this person fired

Commenter helterskelter alerted us to a Facebook post by Zoé Samudzi on April 28 vehemently dispraising Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article and suggesting a letter.

It turns out it’s a public post, so we can all read it.

zoe

who’s on the editorial board over at hypatia? i honestly want to talk about this absolutely disgusting and harmful legitimization of “transracial” identity beyond adoption. what kind of garbage de-raced and probably trans-exclusionary gender studies professor wants to pretend that socially constructed identities use the same logics and are interchangeable? is gender suddenly inheritable the same way race is?

who wanna put together some kind of letter because i refuse to allow this garbage to gain traction. if anyone has institutional access and wouldn’t mind sending me copy so i can read it and properly put forth a response, i’d deeply appreciate it.

The first comment is

Lol author’s name is Becky!

But they soon get down to business.

Capture

Alexis Shotwell It’s really messed up. I’m on the editorial board of Hypatia, and surprised that this one didn’t come to me for review, given my work. I’m working up a response/intervention with a few folks now, too.
Like · 11 · April 28 at 3:02pm

Mimi Thi Nguyen Alexis, I’m also part of a loose group –including Aren (a mutual FB friend!)– writing a response. Should we coordinate? Ideas for best strategies?
Like · 1 · April 30 at 1:03pm · Edited

Zoé Samudzi i’m not a part of anything, but would love to be 👀
Like · 3 · April 30 at 1:14pm

Alexis Shotwell I think the letter we’ve been working on is about to be done! I’ll post it here when I get the okay from the others
Like · 5 · April 30 at 2:47pm

Someone else offers to connect Samudzi – or everyone reading, it’s not clear which – with people at the university where Tuvel teaches.

Tallyn Owens If you want to get in touch with anyone at Rhodes, shoot me a message and I’ll be happy to help.
Like · April 28 at 12:45pm

Then someone posts what is apparently a list of her courses:

Capture

There’s a lot more ugliness after that. A colleague at Rhodes chimes in. Someone suggests a demand that she pay reparations.

Capture

The final comment is “can we get this person fired” [sic]

So that, I think, clarified Samudzi’s role in all this. She was part of the inspiration for the open letter, and she did her bit to work people into a rage at Rebecca Tuvel the person. (She told me on Twitter that her “critique” of the article wasn’t personal at all. I think this pretty effectively demolishes that claim.)

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An enraged president stewing

May 10th, 2017 5:25 pm | By

The Times has the inside scoop on how it all went down inside Trump’s brain psychotic rage organ and the surrounding buildings.

The countdown to President Trump’s dismissal of James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, began last weekend with an enraged president stewing over Mr. Comey’s testimony to Congress last week, when he admitted to being “slightly nauseous” about doing anything to get Mr. Trump elected.

Mr. Trump, according to people close to the president, had been openly talking about firing Mr. Comey for at least a week. Despite the objections from some of his aides about the optics and the lack of an obvious successor, the grumbling evolved into a tentative plan as he angrily watched the Sunday news shows at his Bedminster, N.J., golf resort.

I guess he thinks of underlings as more or less janitors, who are there to please him and if they stop doing that they gotta go.

By Monday, capping off months of festering grievances, Mr. Trump told people around him that he wanted Mr. Comey gone, repeatedly questioning Mr. Comey’s fitness for the job and telling aides there was “something wrong” with him, several people familiar with the discussions said.

I bet I know what’s wrong with him! He doesn’t kiss Trump’s bum enough.

At first, Mr. Trump, who is fond of vetting his decisions with a wide circle of staff members, advisers and friends, kept his thinking to a small circle, venting his anger to Vice President Mike Pence; the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II; and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who all told him they generally backed dismissing Mr. Comey.

Another early sounding board was Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s longtime director of security and now a member of the White House staff, who would later be tasked with delivering the manila envelope containing Mr. Comey’s letter of dismissal to F.B.I. Headquarters, an indication of just how personal the matter was to the president.

Wise counselors all, I’m sure.

Bannon advised delay, saying there would be less of a backlash if he waited. (Why would that be? More time would merely be more time for Trump to act like an unhinged greedy lunatic, so how would that help?) Anyway Trump was having none of it.

Mr. Trump was adamant, denouncing Mr. Comey’s conduct in both the Clinton and Russia investigations, and left aides on Monday with the impression that he planned to take action the next day.

He’s decisive! He’s bold! He’s strong! He’s resolute.

Ok he’s petulant and stubborn. Whatever.

Early Tuesday, he made his final decision, keeping many aides, including the president’s communications team and network of surrogates, in the dark until news of the firing leaked out late in the afternoon.

Ah that’s sweet. “Surprise!!” It must be fabulous working for him.

Mr. Trump explained the firing by citing Mr. Comey’s handling of the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server — a justification that was rich in irony, White House officials acknowledged, considering that as recently as two weeks ago, the president appeared at a rally where he was serenaded with chants of “Lock her up!”

I wouldn’t call it irony, exactly. Shameless lying? Cynical brutality? Abusing our intelligence?

On Wednesday, the president and his staff had widened their criticism of Mr. Comey’s conduct on the Clinton inquiry to include a wider denunciation of his performance. “He wasn’t doing a good job,” Mr. Trump said, before entering a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, early Wednesday. “Very simply, he was not doing a good job.”

How would he know? He has no idea what a good job is. He thinks it’s making money by whatever means come most readily to hand.

Yet even in his letter to Mr. Comey, the president mentioned the Russia inquiry, writing that “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.”

Jeffrey Toobin is emphatic on how utterly inappropriate that was if it happened. He’s also quite sure it didn’t happen as described. He’s also emphatic on how inappropriate it is for Trump to say it, whether it’s true or not.

And that reflected, White House aides said, what they conceded had been his obsession over the investigation Mr. Trump believes is threatening his larger agenda.

The hostility toward Mr. Comey in the West Wing in recent weeks was palpable, aides said, with advisers describing an almost ritualistic need to criticize the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation to assuage an anxious and angry president.

And that angry, anxious, obsessive president has access to the nukes.

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Please sir, can I have some more?

May 10th, 2017 3:53 pm | By

They just wanted to slow the investigation down a little, that’s all.

Days before he was fired, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in resources for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to four congressional officials, including Senator Richard J. Durbin.

Mr. Comey made his appeal to Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who also wrote the Justice Department’s memo that was used to justify the firing of Mr. Comey this week, the officials said.

“I’m told that as soon as Rosenstein arrived, there was a request for additional resources for the investigation and that a few days afterwards, he was sacked,” said Mr. Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois. “I think the Comey operation was breathing down the neck of the Trump campaign and their operatives, and this was an effort to slow down the investigation.”

Of course they shouldn’t be making any effort to slow down the investigation…

The timing of Mr. Comey’s request is not clear-cut evidence that his firing was related to the Russia investigation. But it is certain to fuel bipartisan criticism that President Trump appeared to be meddling in an investigation that had the potential to damage his presidency.

Noooooooo, why would anybody think that.

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Ideological alignment dressed up as intellectual expertise

May 10th, 2017 11:53 am | By

At Quillette, Oliver Traldi on the Rebecca Tuvel uproar.

The letter he refers to is the open letter explaining how Tuvel was wrong wrong wrong.

The letter’s most important point is hidden in the first complaint: that Tuvel “uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields.” In the Daily Nous comments, academics in these subfields struggled to identify precisely which arguments Tuvel failed to cite or address, or where her thinking might have gone wrong on a more than superficial level. Indeed, many philosophers of both gender and race have come out against retraction. But “the relevant subfields” are not really the academic studies of gender and race. They are the political interests and values associated with a certain conception of those topics. The real complaint is that anyone who publishes in a journal like Hypatia, itself a blatantly activist organ, ought to share those politics. In turn, the necessary politics are built in to the “vocabulary and frameworks” used by the academics. This is ideological alignment dressed up as intellectual expertise.

That is exactly what I’ve been chewing over all along. I’ve been trying to figure out in what sense these fundamentally (and obviously) political ideas are “subfields” in philosophy. I’ve been trying to figure out in what sense they’re academic, and what “peer review” can mean in connection with them, and why other academics are trying to punish another academic for getting them “wrong.”

Tuvel was criticized for not citing enough black or transgender scholars. Such a complaint could be leveled at virtually any philosophy paper. But Tuvel’s critics think it is especially relevant here, because they believe black and transgender scholars would have alerted her to the problematic elements of her work. In her response, however, Tuvel cited both Julia Serrano and Adolph Reed, Jr., who seem to share her methods or contentions; and black and transgender philosophers alike have come out in support of Tuvel in the face of the mob. We are back at a standard paradox of identity politics: its most fervent practitioners often seem most trapped in the delusion that marginalized groups are homogeneous.

That too. It was drearily obvious that the issue wasn’t quantity, it was viewpoint. She didn’t cite “enough black or transgender scholars” saying the approved thing.

Rather, it is Tuvel’s critics who don’t seem to know the feminist literature. Trans-exclusionary positions are actually quite popular among the reigning generation of feminist philosophers, who often hew to Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum that “gender is the social meaning of sex.” Sally Haslanger, the most notorious feminist metaphysician and a leader of several online mobs in her own right, gives an account of gender that both explicitly analogizes it to race and seems to have trans-exclusionary implications. (Tuvel adapts her theory in one part of the paper.) One wonders why the purported opponents of power would attack a young assistant professor at a small school in Tennessee rather than the most prominent writer in the field and a fixture on the faculty at MIT.

By which he means one doesn’t wonder at all, one realizes they are bullies and chickenshits.

In the same way, Tuvel was criticized for not focusing on “lived experience”—the idea being that testimony from the lived experience of black and transgender people would have spurred her to a different conclusion. Guenther similarly but not equivalently talks of Tuvel’s commitment to “ideal theory” rather than “the network of power relations that shape particular historical contexts and meanings.” But to someone who hasn’t rejected out of hand the possibility of transracialism, Tuvel will seem exquisitely attuned to a certain kind of lived experience: the transracial experience. She writes about this experience with great empathy and imagination, but her opponents offer it only ridicule and opprobrium. What then could we say about the reactions of Guenther and others? Well, we might say, for example, that they are themselves unknowingly agents of a network of power relations which we might call cisracial privilege, and that their critiques here serve not only to mock and deride transracial individuals but to marginalize, silence, and erase transracial narrative and experience. The fervency of the reaction we might call evidence of cisracial fragility. For example.

But we had better not be untenured academics if we do.

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Roger Stone is delighted

May 10th, 2017 10:07 am | By

Politico reports that Trump has been increasingly furious about the way Russia keeps upstaging him, so Rosenstein’s memo was an excellent excuse to give Comey the hook. Apparently he thought that if Comey went away everyone would forget all about Russia.

Trump had grown angry with the Russia investigation — particularly Comey admitting in front of the Senate that the FBI was investigating his campaign — and that the FBI director wouldn’t support his claims that President Barack Obama had tapped his phones in Trump Tower.

And yet his claims were simply made up, out of the thin dry air of his own brain. It’s fatuous to expect the FBI director to support one’s personal fantasies.

But the fallout seemed to take the White House by surprise. Trump made a round of calls around 5 p.m., asking for support from senators. White House officials believed it would be a “win-win” because Republicans and Democrats alike have problems with the FBI director, one person briefed on their deliberations said.

Instead, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told him he was making a big mistake — and Trump seemed “taken aback,” according to a person familiar with the call.

…

Trump received letters from Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, calling for Comey’s dismissal, on Tuesday, a spokesman said. The president then decided to fire the FBI director based on the recommendations and moved quickly. The spokesman said Trump did not ask for the letters in advance, and that White House officials had no idea they were coming.

But several other people familiar with the events said Trump had talked about the firing for more than a week, and the letters were written to give him [a] rationale to fire Comey.

He thinks he has absolute power. He can’t absorb information that would convince him otherwise.

While shock dominated much of the FBI and the White House, the mood was more elated at Roger Stone’s house in Florida. Several Stone allies and friends said Stone, who has been frequently mentioned in the investigation, encouraged the president to fire Comey in conversations in recent weeks.

On Twitter, Stone signaled praise for the move by posting an image of Trump from The Apprentice saying, “You’re fired.”

Stone declined to comment Tuesday night but said he was enjoying a fine cigar.

Sweet.

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Very simply he was not doing a good job

May 10th, 2017 9:29 am | By

Now he’s called in Kissinger in hopes that that will make him look not-lunatic.

In his first in-person statement to the press since he fired now-former FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump did not mince words.

“Very simply he was not doing a good job,” Mr. Trump told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan Wednesday during a meeting with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

If it’s so simply that he was not doing a good job, why did it take so long to fire him? If it’s so simply, why didn’t Trump fire him as soon as he took office? If it’s true that he was not doing a good job, why was Trump apparently unaware of it until yesterday? If it’s true that he was not doing a good job, why did Trump heap him with praise during the campaign?

Before this, the president had met privately with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Brennan was the pool reporter.

Mr. Trump added that the firing did not affect his meeting with Lavrov  — the highest-ranking Russian official Mr. Trump has met with face-to-face — in any way.

How would he know? I don’t suppose Lavrov told him “Thank you, Mr President, for making it so clear to the entire world what a hopeless incompetent buffoon you are,” but we can be confident that’s what he was thinking.

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And then there’s the money-laundering question

May 10th, 2017 9:08 am | By

The Post gathers up some items under the heading: After the president fired James Comey, the cloud hanging over the White House just got bigger and darker.

— Donald Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants and amateurs who are either unwilling or unable to tell him no

He’s got no one intelligent and independent to warn him when he’s about to walk off a cliff.

That’s not surprising, of course; it’s more like inevitable. No one intelligent and independent would want to work for Trump. That’s perhaps the fatal flaw in being as comprehensively awful as Trump: the awfulness repels people of quality and doing without them can’t work forever.

— Senior officials at the White House were caught off guard by the intense and immediate blowback to the president’s stunning decision to fire James Comey. They reportedly expected Republicans to back him up and thought Democrats wouldn’t complain loudly because they have been critical of Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Indeed, that was the dubious excuse given publicly for his ouster.

They were saying that, in wonder and amazement, on cable news last night. I shared the wonder and amazement. Seriously? How is that possible?

I guess that demonstrates just how hard it is to find even halfway competent people willing to work for Trump. You have to be really thick not to realize that Trump’s firing Comey would not be a good look.

Spicey had a rough night. The story he tells is bizarre:

“As Spicer tells it, (Deputy Attorney General Rod) Rosenstein was confirmed about two weeks ago and independently took on this issue so the president was not aware of the probe until he received a memo from Rosenstein on Tuesday, along with a letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions recommending that Comey be fired. The president then swiftly decided to follow the recommendation, notifying the FBI via e-mail around 5 p.m. and in a letter delivered to the FBI by the president’s longtime bodyguard. ‘It was all him,’ Spicer said of Rosenstein.” (No serious person believes this.)

It does sound like Trump though. It sounds exactly like Trump. Rosenstein writes a memo, Sessions passes it on along with advice from himself, Trump reads it and is struck all of a heap and leaps to perform An Action. That’s Trump all over. An adult in that job would talk to people first, would think, would consider the likely consequences. But Trump? Nah – he just reacts to stimuli. Rosenstein’s memo was a stimulus.

The Trump people said golly isn’t it time to move on from this Russia thing?

CNN reported that federal prosecutors – as part of the ongoing Russia probe – have now issued grand jury subpoenas to associates of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. “The subpoenas represent the first sign of a significant escalation of activity in the FBI’s broader investigation that began last July into possible ties between Trump campaign associates and Russia,” Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz and Pamela Brown reported. “The subpoenas issued in recent weeks by the US Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, Virginia, were received by associates who worked with Flynn on contracts after he was forced out as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014.”

And then…

It emerged yesterday that Senate investigators have asked the Treasury Department’s criminal investigation division for any relevant financial information related to Trump, his top officials, or his campaign aides. “We’ve made a request, to FinCEN in the Treasury Department, to make sure, not just for example vis-a-vis the President, but just overall our effort to try to follow the intel no matter where it leads,” said Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, per CNN. FinCEN is the federal agency that has been investigating allegations of foreign money-laundering through purchases of U.S. real estate. “You get materials that show if there have been, what level of financial ties between, I mean some of the stuff, some of the Trump-related officials, Trump campaign-related officials and other officials and where those dollars flow — not necessarily from Russia.” Until the Treasury Department responds with documents, Warner said, he plans to withhold support for Trump’s nominees.

That could be the proverbial

Image result for smoking gun

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So he persisted

May 10th, 2017 8:32 am | By

Meanwhile, in Trump’s US, reporters are not allowed to ask administration officials questions if the officials don’t feel like being asked questions. By “not allowed” I mean they get arrested and charged with a crime if they do.

A veteran West Virginia reporter has been arrested and charged with “disruption of government services” in the state capitol for “yelling questions” at visiting Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price and White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway.

Daniel Ralph Heyman, 54, with the Public News Service of West Virginia, was freed on $5,000 bond Tuesday night on a charge of “willful disruption of government processes,” according to a criminal complaint.

“The above defendant was aggressively breaching the secret service agents to the point where the agents were forced to remove him a couple of times from the area walking up the hallway in the main building of the Capitol,” the complaint states. It adds Heyman caused a disturbance by “yelling questions at Ms. Conway and Secretary Price.”

The misdemeanor carries a possible fine of $100 and up to six months in jail.

Heyman later told reporters he was “trying to do my job” by pressing the secretary on whether domestic violence would be considered a pre-existing condition under the proposed American Health Care Act.

This isn’t obnoxious fans pestering a rock star. It’s journalists asking government officials questions. We need them to do that, especially with this administration. Trump and his gang are secretive and they tell lies. We need reporters to press them.

Heyman, a veteran reporter who covers health issues for Public News Service, said he was holding his phone out to record the impromptu hallway interview but Price repeatedly refused to respond. “He didn’t say anything,” Heyman told reporters. “So I persisted.”

Elizabeth Warren joke there.

The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia called the charges “outrageous” and said the arrest was “a blatant attempt to chill an independent, free press.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia posted a statement on Facebook:

This a dangerous time in our country. Freedom of the press is being eroded every day. We have a President who calls the media “fake news” and resists transparency at every turn. And today, a reporter was arrested for trying to ask a question to members of President Trump’s administration. Mr. Heyman’s arrest is a blatant attempt to chill an independent, free press. The charges against him are outrageous, and they must be dropped immediately.

By asking Tom Price and Kellyanne Conway whether domestic violence was considered a preexisting condition under President Trump’s healthcare proposal, Dan Heyman was doing his job as a reporter. He was fulfilling that sacred role of the media in a democratic state of holding our elected officials accountable regarding the vital issues of the day. And for that, he was arrested.

What President Trump’s administration is forgetting, and what the Capitol Police forgot today, is that the government works for us. Today was a dark day for democracy. But the rule of law will prevail. The First Amendment will prevail. The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia stands ready to fight any attempt by the government to infringe upon our First Amendment rights.

We are allowed to ask them questions.

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Trump says he’s draining the swamp

May 10th, 2017 7:57 am | By

You’ve probably seen them already, but I can’t not post Trump’s After the Firing tweets.

Well, first there’s the characteristic vulgarity and inappropriateness – a stupid childish epithet as the first word, from the sitting president. Then there’s the ludicrous point-missing. The issue isn’t the merits of Comey. It’s why now and not last July; it’s the investigation; it’s the suddenness and randomness; it’s the investigation; it’s the conspicuously shitty way it was done; it’s the investigation.

Same thing. No, Donald, that’s not it.

Then why did you wait more than three months?

Then he retweets something about Mexico and drugs from the Drudge report. Diversion! Road trip!

Then back to the firing.

Oh christ. Can he really believe that? Is he that stupid?

Then another RT of the Drudge Report, but this time with a Comey-scandals story. Subtle!

Next up, three tweets attacking a Democratic Senator.

And last for now, the one where he tipped off CNN that he was watching CNN with the result that CNN addressed him directly with some useful advice.

This is our new reality.

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Library trolling

May 9th, 2017 5:02 pm | By

The BBC’s live coverage of the Tuesday Afternoon Massacre:

Richard Nixon Library stands behind its man
Posted at
16:37
Richard Nixon’s presidential library is effectively trolling on Twitter, pointing out that the disgraced former president managed not to fire the director of the FBI.

Trump’s dismissal of Comey drew widespread comparisons with Nixon’s actions over the Watergate scandal, leading ‘Nixonian’ to trend on Twitter.

#Watergate is also trending on Twitter.

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The previous coup

May 9th, 2017 4:52 pm | By

Via Ira Flatow:

Image may contain: 2 people

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Recused

May 9th, 2017 4:31 pm | By

Jeff Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Russian interference with the election. That means he should not have issued this statement:

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Don’t get too comfortable

May 9th, 2017 4:01 pm | By

Trump has fired Comey. This could be the beginning of a coup.

The Washington Post:

FBI Director James B. Comey has been dismissed by the president, according to White House spokesman Sean Spicer – a startling move that officials said stemmed from a conclusion by Justice Department officials that he had mishandled the probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Comey was fired as he is leading a counterintelligence investigation to determine whether associates of President Trump may have coordinated with Russia to meddle with the presidential election last year. That probe began quietly last July but has now become the subject of intense debate in Washington. It is unclear how Comey’s dismissal will affect that investigation.

Read that second paragraph ten or twenty times, in case it didn’t sink in.

Officials said Comey was fired because senior Justice Department officials concluded he had violated Justice Department principles and procedures by publicly discussing the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of private email.

WHAT???????

Is this a bad dream? Am I hallucinating it?

Officials released a Tuesday memo from the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, laying out the rationale behind Comey’s dismissal.

“The FBI’s reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage, and it has affected the entire Department of Justice,’’ Rosenstein wrote…

In a letter to Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that he agreed.

“I have concluded that a fresh start is needed at the leadership of the FBI,’’ Sessions wrote. “I must recommend that you remove Director James B. Comey, Jr. and identify an experienced and qualified individual to lead the great men and women of the FBI.’’

Why would they want someone experienced and qualified at the FBI when they don’t want that in any of their own people?

The NY Times:

Mr. Comey’s dismissal was a stunning development for a president that benefited from the F.B.I. investigation of the Democratic nominee during the 2016 campaign. Separately, the F.B.I. also is investigating whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the election.

The abrupt firing raised questions over whether Mr. Trump was trying to influence the Russia investigation. But he said he was following recommendations from the Justice Department, which criticized how Mr. Comey concluded the investigation into Mrs. Clinton.

Well he wasn’t going to say he was doing it to sabotage the Russia investigation, was he.

Mr. Comey broke with longstanding tradition and policies by publicly discussing the Clinton case last July and chastising her “careless” handling of classified information. Then, in the campaign’s final days, Mr. Comey announced that the F.B.I. was reopening the investigation, a move that earned him widespread criticism.

Yet many of the facts cited as evidence for Mr. Comey’s dismissal were well known when Mr. Trump decided to keep him on the job. Mr. Comey was three years in to a 10-year term.

Plus Trump loved all that. Comey probably gave him the election.

I would love to think this is just more Trump craziness, but it looks much worse than that.

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Few accused of blasphemy walk free

May 9th, 2017 11:33 am | By

Now for some literal oppression and violence:

A court in Indonesia has sentenced the capital’s Christian governor to two years in prison for blasphemy against Islam, in a decision that has cheered Muslim conservatives and crushed the hopes of advocates of a more pluralistic and tolerant path for their nation.

Jakarta Gov. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, nicknamed “Ahok”, had not been expected to do time in jail, as prosecutors had sought only a suspended sentence.

But in Indonesia, few accused of blasphemy walk free. Reuters reports that Ahok was taken to a prison in east Jakarta where, according to his lawyer Tommy Sihotang, he would remain “despite his appeal process unless a higher court suspended it.”

There was no “blasphemy.” Even if you accept the concept of “blasphemy” there was none.

The blasphemy charges relate to comments Ahok made last September. He told a group of fishermen that politicians who tell them that the Quran forbids voting for non-Muslims are lying to them.

“As governor, as a public officer,” Judge Abdul Rosyad said Tuesday “the defendant should have known that religion is a sensitive issue so he should have avoided talking about religion.”

But he was talking about politicians lying about religion. That’s also labeled “blasphemy”?

Critics see Ahok’s fate as tied to a prolonged decline in religious tolerance in Indonesia. With that decline, Harsono says, has come “a rise of conservative forces which use Islam to advocate their political interests.”

The nation’s main clerical group, the Indonesian Ulema Council, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, last October accusing Ahok of blasphemy. Prosecutors later cited the fatwa in their indictment of Ahok. Critics point out that religious edicts have no bearing on Indonesia’s laws.

Islamist groups orchestrated several mass protests against Ahok that convulsed the capital’s streets. On Monday, Jokowi named the pan-Islamic group Hizbut Tahrir as being behind the protests and ordered their local arm disbanded.

Ahok’s sentence bodes ill for Jokowi, whose term as president will end in 2019. “Jokowi is very likely,” Harsono predicts, to be “accused of being the ally of a blasphemer.”

Indonesia used to be cited as an example of a majority-Muslim nation that was relatively moderate and liberal.

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Count the scare-quotes

May 9th, 2017 11:08 am | By

Another entry, this one by Ani Dutta. What’s interesting about this one is the nested hedging and qualifying, which is so recursive that you end up unable to figure out what the claim is.

I have a feeling that I’m not going to be riding any popularity waves with this one, but I wanted to register my discomfort with the way in which ‘trans / gender non-conforming’ and ‘people of color’ voices have often been essentialized and homogenized in the wake of the controversy on Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article that defends ‘transracialism’ and makes analogies between ‘transgenderism’ and ‘transracialism’. I do not say this ‘as’ a trans/gender non-conforming person of color (categories I use with discomfort given their US-centric hegemonic senses), as I don’t believe that occupying those positions necessarily justifies or gives more credence to the points I’m about to make. But I am referring to these categories, in which I’m often socially placed, simply to make the point that some of ‘us’ (though there’s no ‘us’) might have differing takes on both the Tuvel article and the question of transracialism than the general stance of condemnation and dismissal that ‘we’ have been associated with.

Between scare quotes and talk of essentializing and disavowals followed by avowals…we get lost in the forest. Dutta either is or is not a trans/gender non-conforming person of color, and either does or does not speak as such; I can’t tell which it is. Maybe it’s both. There is no us, but some of us might have differing takes – except that there is no us. Or ‘us.’ (If there is no ‘us’ does that mean there is an us?)

It’s one academic style, I guess, but my god it seems pointless. There might be a good point in there but I can’t tell what it is.

There’s the obligatory rebuke of Adichie, and an acknowledgement that identity is complicated, and then we get to Tuvel.

This brings me more specifically to the Tuvel article: I agree that it is simplistic and problematic on several fronts, and especially fell short in its understanding of trans issues. As critiques point out, it reduces trans identities to a medical-surgical model of transitioning to another “sex” and ignores the trans-GNC critique of sex assignment (using phrases like ‘biological sex’ and ‘male genitalia’); further, it admittedly ignores non-binary subjectivities or practices, makes the sexed body the basis for both cis and trans identity, etc. Ideally none of this should have made past peer review, but these are far wider problems with entire biomedical discourses of transsexuality and are replicated across many academic disciplines, and even in some trans activism, rather than just this article in itself, and her article is not fundamentally making claims on trans identity anyway so they do not necessarily invalidate her main argument (which could still be critiqued, but that is a separate question).

Yikes, that last sentence ran away. But what I’m wondering is what kind of peer review it is that “none of this” should have made it past. The discipline in question is philosophy, so I’m wondering what philosophical peer review has to do with any of that. What field or discipline is the authority on “non-binary subjectivities” or “the trans-GNC critique of sex assignment” or why it’s wrong to use phrases like ‘biological sex’ and ‘male genitalia’? Is any of that an academic subject at all?

Also, specifically responding to a public post by a colleague, the Tuvel piece has been accused of managerial whiteness and the violence of abstracting and controlling differences, deciding which differences are equivalent or not, etc. I do appreciate and agree with the argument that philosophy, and academic theorization more broadly, is often guilty of managerial violence and the violence of abstracting differences over material bodies and experiences that theorizers don’t inhabit or share.

The violence of abstracting differences? I think that’s an agreement too many. On the other hand Dutta does say Tuvel shouldn’t be singled out for that.

Last but not least, moving beyond the specific Tuvel case, it seems important to introspect about why many of us (POC or not) have such a gut reaction to ‘transracialism’, racial self-determination and the analogy between racial & gender identity, while gender self-determination seems to be much easier to accept (even Adichie who generalizes male privilege onto all trans women seems to accept some degree of gender self-determination). Going by my preliminary and not entirely fleshed-out train of thoughts, part of it may have to do with the different ways in which ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are socially constructed, and these differences need to be interrogated more than they have been in recent debates. Broadly speaking, there is a relentless social demand that ‘gender’ be personalized and interiorized. Both conventional cisgender and more trans-inclusive epistemologies of gender (especially in the West) *demand* that we associate gendered embodiments, expressions, behaviors, words / terms, with a deeply *interior* identity (recalling the argument that Foucault famously makes about sexuality) – our gendered actions or embodiments must *mean* something in terms of the ontology of our inner selves, must correspond with a deeply held personal identity (even if that is genderqueer or fluid or agender, inasmuch as these are ‘identities’). Much of our hard-won struggles against biological essentialism and for gender self-determination often remain imbricated in this potentially oppressive ideology, being in some sense the obverse of the cissexist idea that social sex assignment ‘naturally’ corresponds to a gendered essence…

And yet that’s the exact opposite of what the hated radical feminists think. We think there is no “gendered essence” and that saying there is is what’s oppressive.

‘Race’, in contrast, is etymologically linked with ideas of common descent and collective lineage, deriving from one’s position within a collective rather than a deeply held personal identity…

Now there we’re onto something. We’re onto why trans activism is revealing itself to be such awful politics: it’s because it’s about “a deeply held personal identity,” which is about as opposed to the political as you can get. Basing a politics on an intensely anti-political idea is a recipe for disaster, and disaster is what we’ve got.

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Two years ago

May 9th, 2017 9:59 am | By

Interesting. Cressida Heyes wrote that apology by the Associate Editors of Hypatia, but a couple of years ago she said something that would probably get the Guardians of Total Correctness on her ass too.

It’s a piece about Dolezal from July 2015 asking if we can really.

After being outed publicly, Dolezal brought her case to the court of public opinion, saying she is transethnic and drawing parallels between her and Caitlyn Jenner’s transgenderism.

But Hernandez-Ramdwar says being transethnic and being transgender is not the same thing.

“They do not choose to be transgender – they just are,” she says pointing out that transgender people are often dealing with actual physical, chromosomal, genetic identity elements. “On the other hand, if someone claims that they are ‘transracial’, in my opinion, they are choosing to ‘perform’ what they assume to be an ethnicity that is attached to a certain race in a certain context.”

Which is why a line needs to be drawn between race and ethnicity.

But notice she said “transgender people are often dealing with actual physical, chromosomal, genetic identity elements” – often, not always. One of the crimes people get mobbed for now is suggesting there are criteria of that kind. No no no, mustn’t say that: anyone who says she is trans is trans, end of. Identifying as trans is all there is, there isn’t any more.

Also it’s not permitted to ask any questions about criteria or reasons or how do you know. Oh hell no you can’t do that.

Also is it true that no one chooses to be transgender? How do we know? How can we know when it’s not permitted to ask? Especially when more and more of the rhetoric is about choice and identity?

“Race is a social construction based entirely on appearance; it changes according to time and place,” she says. “Ethnicity is about culture, practice, behaviour, sense of belonging – it may or may not coincide with how a person looks, but generally speaking we cannot tell someone’s ethnicity by looking at them.”

So is there such a thing as transethnicity?

“I suppose so, someone who was raised Catholic and converts to Judaism is ‘transethnic’, someone who moves to another country and takes another citizenship is ‘transethnic’ and someone who learns another language and then makes that their primary language is ‘transethnic,’” she says. “In a nutshell, we can choose our ethnicity and ties but we cannot, however choose our race as it is something based on how we are perceived by others.”

And sex isn’t? Gender isn’t?

And now Cressida Heyes.

But Dolezal’s relation to Jenner’s public coming out isn’t entirely left field. Both gender and race have complicated histories, this true. And while they don’t necessarily intersect, they are both built on the foundation of what you look like, says Dr. Cressida Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality and a professor at the University of Alberta.

“That’s the place where race and sex come together,” says Heyes. “One of the reasons Caitlyn Jenner has been taken seriously in the mainstream press is because she’s been made to look very conventionally feminine, she’s hot, she’s what a woman is supposed to be so people will buy it.”

The reality, explains Heyes, is for every Caitlyn Jenner there are dozens more who are trans-ambiguous, people who can’t be readily labeled as masculine or feminine.

“And they have a much harder time, people don’t think that that’s okay,” says Heyes. “Something similar is happening with interracial.”

Where were the open letters denouncing this heresy?

She points to a student she has who has a black father and white mother.

“Like Barack Obama she’s not more black than she is white but because of the way race works in Canada, as well in the States, she has to be black because that’s how other people perceive her,” says Heyes. “She identifies that way partly because that’s how the world treats her – you have some degree of choice as to how you present yourself but it’s not all up to you.”

The door Dolezal seems to have opened with the transethnic identity debate has neatly fit into the treads of race and sex, the physical representations we ascribe to identity. But Heyes says the conversation would be more constructive looking at how those identities supplement the things we do and create.

“To me, those are the interesting questions, like what kind of politics are you engaging in when you present yourself in a particular way, not are you real or are you fake,” says Heyes. “But we get really trapped by that language, who’s really black and who’s really a woman.”

Yet two years later she led the denunciation of Rebecca Tuvel.

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18 more days

May 9th, 2017 6:00 am | By

What did Donnie from Queens know and when did he know it?

Less than a week into the Trump administration, Sally Q. Yates, the acting attorney general, hurried to the White House with an urgent concern. The president’s national security adviser, she said, had lied to the vice president about his Russian contacts and was vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.

“We wanted to tell the White House as quickly as possible,” Ms. Yates told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Monday. “To state the obvious: You don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians.”

But President Trump did not immediately fire the adviser, Michael T. Flynn, over the apparent lie or the susceptibility to blackmail. Instead, Mr. Flynn remained in office for 18 more days. Only after the news of his false statements broke publicly did he lose his job on Feb. 13.

Ms. Yates’s testimony, along with a separate revelation Monday that President Barack Obama had warned Mr. Trump not to hire Mr. Flynn, offered a more complete public account of Mr. Flynn’s stunning fall from one of the nation’s most important security posts.

And, in particular, of Trump’s stunning failure to act on what Sally Yates told them.

It also raised fresh doubts about Mr. Trump’s judgment in keeping Mr. Flynn in place despite serious Justice Department concerns. White House officials have not fully explained why they waited so long.

That’s putting it mildly.

At the heart of Monday’s testimony were Mr. Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak. Mr. Flynn denied that they had discussed American sanctions, an assertion echoed by Vice President Mike Pence and the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer. But senior F.B.I. and Justice Department officials knew otherwise. Mr. Kislyak, like many foreign diplomats, was under routine surveillance, and his conversations with Mr. Flynn were recorded, officials have said. Investigators knew that Mr. Flynn had, in fact, discussed sanctions.

Before Trump was inaugurated. He wasn’t supposed to do that, and he wasn’t supposed to lie about it.

Mr. Obama fired Mr. Flynn from his defense intelligence job. And two days after the election, he warned Mr. Trump against making Mr. Flynn his national security adviser, two former Obama administration officials said on Monday. Mr. Obama said he had profound concerns about Mr. Flynn’s taking such a job.

So the clown car gave him the job. That’ll show that pesky Obama guy!

These people are scary.

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Witness tampering

May 8th, 2017 5:42 pm | By

Trump is in fact engaged in witness tampering, on Twitter.

It’s this one:

I was shocked by how inappropriate that is from a president talking about a Senate hearing, but it took a lawyer friend to point out that it’s witness tampering.

Some observers are reporting it that way.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) is asking whether Donald Trump committed a federal crime by engaging in witness intimidation with a tweet about Sally Yates. If Trump was convicted of witness intimidation, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.

It seems pretty ludicrous to deny that that tweet is intimidating, and it does of course name a witness. It doesn’t get much more intimidating than a mentally unstable and vindictive head of state openly threatening you.

Replies to that tweet note that the tampering one also appears on the official POTUS account, which he apparently can’t delete.

The question that Rep. Lieu raised was an interesting one. Is a tweet from the President Of The United States before a witness testifies before Congress potential witness tampering?

A judge would have to answer that question, but Trump is clearly using his social media presence to shape witness testimony. If this is a case of witness tampering, Trump’s tweets could land him in serious legal trouble.

Is that the kind of crime that law enforcement can just ignore because Republicans control everything? Could Trump murder and devour people on camera and not be prosecuted?

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