Great. Trump is replacing the Director of National Intelligence (Dan Coats) with a party hack.

President Donald Trump’s just-announced nominee to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence had already drawn national attention earlier this week, when he delivered an aggressive diatribe against former special counsel Robert Mueller.

…

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, called Ratcliffe’s questioning of Mueller “demagogic” and said the White House selected him for intelligence director because he “exhibited blind loyalty to President Trump.”

“It’s clear that Rep. Ratcliffe was selected because he exhibited blind loyalty to President Trump with his demagogic questioning of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller,” Schumer said in a press release Sunday. “If Senate Republicans elevate such a partisan

This is not a good argument.

Imagine for a moment how this allegation would read (and what the reaction would be) if the word "trans" was replaced with the name of any other minority group within our society: https://t.co/F2Dicb7zKC

— Stop Funding Hate (@StopFundingHate) July 28, 2019

It’s not a good argument because, first, any minority group? But that could be rapists, or psychopaths, or serial killers, or greedy landlords who don’t make repairs (hello Jared Kushner!), or members of the KKK. Being part of a minority group doesn’t automatically make people right about everything. And second because the trans lobby is in fact a special case, so swapping in for instance “feminist lobby pressure” wouldn’t do the work Stop … Read the rest

Guest post by Josh Slocum

Lesbians and gays had to ask, beg, plead, protest, and keep it all up for decades just to get:

• The right not to be fired for being gay
• The right not to be evicted for being gay
• The right to participate in the same tax incentive system that straight married people had

That’s all. That’s all we asked for. Nothing that took from, or imposed on, anyone else.

Trans comes along and is required to do exactly zero work. All they have to do is be a straight man in a wig and scream that they’re oppressed, and instantly laws are changed to make women’s space their legal property.

This is fucking obscene.… Read the rest

Even the Guardian has started to notice.

School counsellors and mental health service providers are bowing to pressures from ‘highly politicised’ transgender groups to affirm children’s beliefs that they were born the wrong sex, a leading expert has warned.

Marcus Evans, a psychotherapist and ex-governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, whose Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) is the only NHS clinic to provide gender counselling and transitioning, said many experts were living in fear of being labelled transphobic, which was having an impact on their objectivity.

Because it’s not just a matter of “being labelled transphobic” and then walk away – it’s a matter of being labelled transphobic and then being shunned and demonized and … Read the rest

Powerful.

President Trump tweeted that Rep. Elijah Cummings’ district is a “rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.”

It’s @VictorBlackwell’s home district.

“When he tweets about infestation, it's about black and brown people,” Blackwell says. pic.twitter.com/YFCvPCFhFk

— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) July 27, 2019

… Read the rest

Wait, what?

The Scotsman reports on payments from the US State Department to Donald Trump’s golf resort in Scotland. So far so corrupt and so familiar. But there’s an extra twist.

Last summer, The Scotsman, detailed a series of payments made by the State Department to SLC Turnberry Limited.

The first, for $10,113 (£8,112), was approved on 5 April 2018, followed by $39,602 (£31,768) and $30,074 (£24,125) on 10 and 11 July respectively.

The latter two payments were for hotel accommodation for Mr Trump and key members of his administration. The president was photographed playing two rounds of golf during his two night stay at Turnberry, part of his visit to the UK.

It is understood the April payment related

Rex Murphy wonders where the Canadian reporting is.

From my perspective the core of the story is not Yaniv, who, from what I have read, presents as opportunistic, cruel and delusionally self-entitled, who manipulates the ever-changing fixations of identity and gender politics for (a) notoriety, (b) possible gain, and (c) some delight in pushing and insulting hard-up people, especially Asians and newcomers (see last week’s column) as a very questionable personal amusement.

Where is this yarn — outside the National Post and Toronto Sun — in the large media of this country? CTV, CBC, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star? Silence. (The Post Millennial has covered the story, as has Blaire White, herself a transgender woman — she

Ahhhhhhhh shut up.

Arwa Mahdawi at the Guardian on The Yaniv Question:

The answer to that is clearly “no”, right? If a female beautician has only been trained to wax female genitalia and only wants to offer these services to women then that should be her prerogative. But, hang on a minute, what if the person who wants their intimate areas to be waxed is a woman with male genitalia? What happens then?

Nothing happens then, because there is no such thing. Women don’t have male genitalia. The question would be “what if the person who wants their intimate areas to be waxed is a man who says he is a woman?”

Then Mahdawi gets down to the serious … Read the rest

I do like a headline that begins with “Scrotum waxing human rights complainant”…

The Toronto Sun on an encounter yesterday between a citizen journalist and J. Yaniv:

Groin waxing human rights complainant and transwoman Jessica Yaniv and her mother got in a heated verbal argument with a citizen journalist at a courthouse in downtown Vancouver on Friday.

“I was there to support these ladies who have the law being used against them in such a ridiculous way,” Dan Dicks told the Sun. “So I was just going to politely ask (Yaniv) a few questions.”

But Yaniv wasn’t having it.

“He called the police, he threatened to pepper spray me, he pulled the alarm in the elevator,” Dicks said

Trump blames Obama for the air conditioning.

Trump offered the new gripe about his predecessor as he explained in the Oval Office Friday why he’ll be spending some time at his New Jersey resort in August.

The president says “it’s never a vacation” when he goes to Bedminster, New Jersey, and that he would rather be at the White House.

He says that some of his time away from the White House gives crews time to do maintenance work.

He says, for example, “The Obama administration worked out a brand new air conditioning system for the West Wing. It was so good before they did the system. Now that they did this system, it’s freezing or hot.”

How would … Read the rest

Another libel case bites the dust:

A federal judge has thrown out a Kentucky teen’s lawsuit accusing the Washington Post of falsely labeling him a racist after an encounter with a Native American man at the Lincoln Memorial.

Nicholas Sandmann, a student at Covington Catholic High School, sued the newspaper for $250 million in February, alleging that it had engaged in “targeting and bullying” and modern “McCarthyism.”

The actions of Sandmann and his classmates were intensely debated after video and photographs emerged of them wearing “Make America great again” hats near a Native American man playing a drum. President Trump cheered the lawsuit, posting to Twitter: “Covington student suing WAPO. Go get them Nick. Fake News!”

Federal Judge William

Jim Wright points out something very important:

“You know you hear that, uh, that Nancy Pelosi and others say walls are unchristian. They’re immoral. If that’s true, then God’s immoral because he told Nehemiah to build a wall around Jerusalem. There’s going to be a wall around Heaven Revelation 41 says. You know I got to preach the inauguration sermon for President Trump and I preached on Nehemiah when God selects a leader and I stopped and said, you see Mr. President, God’s not against walls.”

That’s Robert Jeffress, Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church, Dallas Texas, Fox News religious expert, one of the most influential Evangelicals in the country.

Now, lest you think what I am about to

FFRF on that stupid new South Dakota law:

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is damning an exclusionary new South Dakota law that mandates displaying an “In God We Trust” logo in all public schools.

I guess that’s a free from religion inside joke, “damning” a theocratic law. We noreligionists don’t believe “damning” things is really a meaningful concept. Sarcasm! I like it!

“A new state law that took effect this month requires all public schools in the state’s 149 districts to paint, stencil or otherwise prominently display the national motto,” the Associated Press reports. “The South Dakota lawmakers who proposed the law said the requirement was meant to inspire patriotism in the state’s public schools.”

The law —

For some reason the US has something called “the national motto.” Since when does a country need a “national motto”? What else does it need? A national joke, a national friendship ring, a national slogan, a national pet, a national keychain, a national ring tone? Why do we need laws imposing such things? You may think “oh it’s not an actual law, it’s just some custom-type item” but you’d be wrong, there’s an actual law.

Wikipedia:

The modern motto of the United States of America, as established in a 1956 law signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is “In God we trust“.

That is so stupid. We don’t need a “national motto” and … Read the rest

Lucy Bannerman at the Times:

Jacob has just turned 16 and for the past four years the teenager’s body has been put on pause. He has been on hormone blockers to stop puberty while he decides how far he is willing to go to become a transgender man.

He claims that taking blockers was “the worst decision I’ve ever made”.

Jacob was born a girl but felt unhappy with his gender. “I always felt so weak and pathetic and inferior to the men.” He started using the male pronoun and imagined himself growing up and “dating a woman”.

It’s not as if that feeling is entirely unknown to girls in general. There are different degrees of it, but few … Read the rest