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Many waves

Jun 10th, 2017 6:02 pm | By

Carol Tavris on feminism and misogyny, which she could also have called feminism and reaction or feminism and backlash.

Feminism and misogyny have been locked in a painful, inextricable embrace for centuries: The ascendance of one enrages, provokes and energizes the other. Each seeks justifications for its premisses and goals in religion, culture, tradition – and that most solemn of authorities, science.

No they don’t. Anti-feminism does, but feminism is deeply rooted in resistance to religion, culture, tradition. Until very recently religion, culture, tradition have been centrally about keeping women subordinate and silent.

Anyway, it gets better after that.

Whenever women sought to enter these or any other male-dominated fields, they would get the sneering question that Angela Saini,

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Who gets the extra ice cream?

Jun 10th, 2017 3:18 pm | By

A couple of weeks ago there was an evangelical Christian conference in Sydney “devoted to what it means to be a godly woman.” Oooh I know this one! It means to be obedient, submissive, subordinate, compliant, complaisant, “sweet,” deferential, self-effacing, and not at all in any way challenging to the Authority and Superiority of Men.

During a talk about the meaning of Bible verses on male headship — where men are leaders in the home and the church — an image of newly-shorn actress Kristen Stewart flashed onto an overhead screen.

Was this platinum blonde buzz cut, asked the speaker, Carmelina Read, appropriate for a woman? Was it feminine and submissive, or instead flagging independence and rebellion?

Women should have … Read the rest

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Morrison v Olson

Jun 10th, 2017 10:47 am | By

Alan Dershowitz has been telling the world that Trump can’t be charged with obstruction of justice. Rick Pildes at Lawfare explains what he’s ignoring.

The reason, according to Dershowitz, is that the Constitution gives the exclusive power to the President to control all federal law-enforcement investigations—and  thus to shut any of them down for any reason the President sees fit.  In other words, the President can never commit obstruction of justice by shutting down a criminal investigation or prosecution.

But Dershowitz fails to take into account that the Supreme Court has decisively rejected this view.  In Morrison v. Olson (1988), a 7-1 Supreme Court turned back constitutional challenges   to Congress’ creation of the Act that gave us the office

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At his core a dishonest and untrustworthy man

Jun 10th, 2017 10:02 am | By

At this point the people who don’t think Trump is a confirmed resolute habitual liar would fit comfortably inside a boutique coffee shop in Sausalito. Dana Milbank won’t be sharing a table with them.

In the three hours I sat transfixed in Room 216 of the Hart Building, 15 feet behind the fired FBI director, the line that chilled me more than any other was Comey’s account of why he wrote extensive, real-time notes of his conversations with Trump. “The nature of the person,” Comey explained in part. “I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting, and so I thought it really important to document.”

The nature of the person.

This was the

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The most explosive aspect

Jun 10th, 2017 9:40 am | By

Asha Rangappa writes that the real shocker in Comey’s testimony is Trump’s total indifference to the damage Russia did to us and continues to do.

[A]s a former FBI counterintelligence agent, what I saw as the most explosive aspect of the testimony didn’t involve any legal violation of the U.S. code or questions about whether Comey had broken established Department of Justice protocols. Instead, it was the prima facie evidence that Comey presented that Trump appears unwilling to uphold his oath “to preserve, protect, and defend” the country — which puts the security of our nation and its democracy at stake. In the nine times Trump met with or called Comey, it was always to discuss how the investigation into

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Senators rush to take health care away from millions

Jun 10th, 2017 5:07 am | By

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are stealthily pushing through the no health care for you bill without hearings.

Republican senators are quietly moving toward something that has been their party’s goal for nearly eight years: dismantling the Affordable Care Act. The question, of course, is how they plan to replace it.

Republicans in the Senate will need 50 votes to pass their version of the American Health Care Act. Several senators have expressed reservations about the House version of the bill, which withdraws federal support for Planned Parenthood and rolls back the Medicaid expansion accomplished by the A.C.A.. Despite the lack of consensus within the party, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, on Wednesday began the process of fast-tracking the bill

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When the subject is spilling beans

Jun 10th, 2017 3:53 am | By

There’s another likely explanation for why Comey didn’t tell Trump he was being inappropriate:

During the hearing, several senators pressed Comey about why he didn’t ask obvious follow-up questions, as when Trump allegedly said to the director, “We had that thing.” What thing? Comey also might have queried, “Mr. President, what do you mean when you say you ‘hope’?” Or, as various commentators have suggested, why didn’t Comey say, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but this is highly inappropriate and I’m going to have to excuse myself”?

Ask any reporter, whose skills are essentially investigative, and the answer is: You don’t ever interrupt when the subject is spilling beans.

Ohhhh. Of course. Comey’s the head of the FBI and there’s Trump … Read the rest

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The dinner was far worse than the speech

Jun 9th, 2017 6:18 pm | By

Trump’s European jaunt was even worse than we knew.

After a public showing on May 25 in which Trump refused to endorse NATO’s collective defense clause and famously shoved the Montenegrin leader out of the way, leaders of the 29-member alliance retired to a closed-door dinner that multiple sources tell Foreign Policy left alliance leaders “appalled.”

Trump had two versions of prepared remarks for the dinner, one that took a traditional tack and one prepared by the more NATO-skeptic advisors, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. “He dumped both of them and improvised,” one source briefed on the dinner told FP.

During the dinner, Trump went off-script to criticize allies again for not spending enough on defense. (The United

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We had that thing you know

Jun 9th, 2017 6:04 pm | By

Ana Marie Cox notes that some people think of John Dean as the parallel to Comey but she has been thinking of Anita Hill.

To be completely honest, I didn’t just think of Hill’s experience, either. I thought of mine. Indeed, anyone who has been the target of sexual harassment or sexual abuse would have trouble not hearing echoes of their own story in what Comey had to say about the president. When I noted on Twitter that Trump’s behavior with Comey sounded a lot like that of a sexual predator, my timeline exploded with grim confirmation. And I wasn’t the only one making that connection.

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The president went out of his way to let Comey know he

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Put a hold on the glitterpants

Jun 9th, 2017 5:33 pm | By

Scalzi:

Do you still think James Comey wasn’t very good at his job?

Kind of? I think what his testimony solidified for me is that James Comey was probably pretty good at the day to day minutiae of his former gig, and also that within the context of that gig he was pretty ethical. But I also think he made some high-profile bad calls, and that very same desire for ethical action caused him to exacerbate rather than mitigate some of those bad calls.

At this point I’ve gotten used to thinking of Comey as something of a tragic figure, whose greatest virtue — a desire to act ethically and above the usual boundaries of politics in the execution

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Guest post: Reading Whipping Girl 6

Jun 9th, 2017 3:52 pm | By

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

Chapter 6 of Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl begins thusly:

“As a transsexual woman, I am often confronted by people who insist that I am not, nor can I ever be, a ‘real woman.’ One of the more common lines of reasoning goes something like this: There’s more to being a woman than simply putting on a dress.” I couldn’t agree more.

So what does Serano think a woman is? We’ll have to skip ahead to the end of the chapter to find anything like an answer:

The one thing that women share is that we are all perceived as women, and treated accordingly. As a feminist, I look forward to a time when

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A very close friend of Putin’s

Jun 9th, 2017 3:32 pm | By

Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz:

Kasowitz worked for the law firmMayer Brown. In 1993 Kasowitz, 18 lawyers and two clients left Mayer Brown to establish the Kasowitz Benson Torres law firm.[4][12]

He has also defended Bill O’Reilly from allegations of sexual harassment,[13] and is defending Sberbank of Russia. Additionally, Kasowitz represents a company run by a Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is a very close friend of Vladimir Putin and who employed Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort for several years.[14]

I think we’re done here.… Read the rest

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The bad man talks back

Jun 9th, 2017 2:48 pm | By

The lying sack of shit is fighting back. He threw a news conference this afternoon along with another hapless head of state, and seized the opportunity to say Comey lied under oath.

President Trump on Friday accused James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, of lying under oath to Congress in testimony that the president dismissed as a politically motivated proceeding.

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“Yesterday showed no collusion, no obstruction,” Mr. Trump said in the White House Rose Garden, during a news conference with the visiting Romanian president, Klaus Iohannis.

“That was an excuse by the Democrats, who lost an election they shouldn’t have lost,” he said. “It was just an excuse, but we were very, very happy, and, frankly, James

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Because he’s a beastly minotaur and no chains can bind him

Jun 9th, 2017 12:03 pm | By

Benjamin Wittes on the Comey hearing as a matter of honor and dishonor:

It is a clarifying moment whenever an honorable person speaks plainly in public about a person he or she evidently regards as dishonorable on a matter of public moment. And today, a nation not normally riveted by congressional hearings got a chance to see what I was talking about. In three hours of testimony characterized by well-controlled but palpable anger, Comey attacked what he described as “lies” about the FBI and “defam[ation]” about himself; he accused the President of the United States of implicitly directing him to drop a major criminal investigation of a former senior official; he described a pattern of disrespect for the independence

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Comey set so many perjury traps for them

Jun 9th, 2017 10:31 am | By

Another thing I’ve been wondering is how reckless it is or is not for Trump’s lawyer to make sweeping assertions of fact that he can’t possibly know. The Times yesterday:

Before firing Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump was dogged by the F.B.I. inquiry into his campaign’s ties to Russia. But he was never personally under investigation.

Now, he faces the prospect of an obstruction investigation, inquiries by emboldened congressional officials and questions from both parties about whether he tried inappropriately to end the F.B.I. inquiry into Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser.

Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, flatly denied any obstruction. “The president never, in form or substance, directed or suggested that Mr. Comey stop

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Behind closed doors

Jun 9th, 2017 9:39 am | By

The Times reported yesterday that Trump is feeling all happy and fighty about the Comey hearing.

President Trump dipped in and out of the small dining room off the Oval Office on Thursday to monitor a television as James B. Comey, the ousted F.B.I. director, told a tortured tale — and to insist to his huddled legal team, “I was right.”

Many Democrats and some legal analysts predicted big trouble for the president after Mr. Comey’s blow-by-blow description to the Senate Intelligence Committee of Mr. Trump’s efforts to steer the investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, behavior they think amounted to obstruction of justice.

But Mr. Trump and many of his aides believe that Mr. Comey’s

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Meet the DUP

Jun 9th, 2017 8:39 am | By

Adam Ramsay at Open Democracy guesses people might want to know more about the DUP along about now.

The Democratic Unionist Party now look like the Tories preferred coalition partners. The DUP, which is the biggest Unionist (ie pro-UK) party in Northern Ireland, are often treated as though they are just the same as the other Unionist party they have essentially replaced – the Ulster Unionists. But while the UUP have a long running relationship with the Tories, and are a centre right party, the DUP are another thing entirely. The idea that they are near power in Westminster should worry us all. Here are some things you need to know.

Theresa May’s new partners in government have strong historical

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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments


Total and complete vindication

Jun 9th, 2017 7:44 am | By

He’s back, unimproved by his day off from the tweet-machine.

He accuses Comey of lies – he does, the guy who lies to our faces about stuff we’ve watched him do and say.

And it’s not “leaking” to share your own unclassified notes.

Yeah, great reporting by the most dishonest major “news” outlet we’ve got.

After that he retweeted Dershowitz:

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Repeal all the rules!

Jun 8th, 2017 5:20 pm | By

Meanwhile the House Republicans have done their bit to take us back to the fun roller coaster ride of 2008.

The House approved legislation on Thursday to erase a number of core financial regulations put in place by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, as Republicans moved a step closer to delivering on their promises to eliminate rules that they claim have strangled small businesses and stagnated the economy.

Because everything was so much better in 2008.

Apparently it’s not likely to pass the Senate though.

Yet the bill’s passage in the House, by 233 to 186, keeps alive the Republican Party’s dream of unwinding one of President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishments. The vote quickly drew the ire of Democrats who

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It was a suggestion

Jun 8th, 2017 4:43 pm | By

The Times is understandably proud of the part it played.

James B. Comey, the recently fired F.B.I. director, said Thursday in an extraordinary Senate hearing that he believed that President Trump had clearly tried to derail an F.B.I. investigation into his former national security adviser and that the president had lied and defamed him.

Mr. Comey, no longer constrained by the formalities of a government job, offered a blunt, plain-spoken assessment of a president whose conversations unnerved him from the day they met, weeks before Mr. Trump took office. His testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee provided an unflattering back story to his abrupt dismissal and squarely raised the question of whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice.

Answering that

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