CNN reports the latest insanity:

In an unprecedented purge of the military’s senior leadership Friday night, President Donald Trump fired the top US general just moments before his defense secretary fired the chief of the US Navy and the vice chief of the Air Force.

Trump announced he was dismissing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown and replacing him with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dan “Razin” Caine – an extraordinary move since Caine is retired, according to an Air Force official, and is not a four-star general.

Trump called Brown a “fine gentleman” and an “outstanding leader,” while hinting at the firings to come. “Finally, I have also directed Secretary [of Defense Pete] Hegseth to solicit nominations for five additional high level positions, which will be announced soon,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Minutes later, Hegseth released a statement announcing he’d fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy.

The removal of the second Black man to serve as America’s most senior general and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff appears to send a strong signal from an administration that has outlawed diversity and inclusion efforts across the military and wider government.

Hegseth called Franchetti a “DEI hire” in his 2024 book, in which he wrote: “If naval operations suffer, at least we can hold our heads high. Because at least we have another first! The first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — hooray.”

Hegseth on Friday also said that Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force, had been fired, and that he was “requesting nominations” for the Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force, indicating they will be replaced.

Systematically firing a woman and a Black man for being a woman and Black respectively.

This is hell, nor are we out of it.

John Cleese in 2018:

My American friends are asking me about President Trumps’s observation that the British ‘like him’.

I regret this is quite unfounded.

The explanation for this canard is that Trump is pronoid.

Pronoid is the opposite of paranoid. A paranoid person thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody is out to get them. A pronoid person is someone who thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody likes them.

The fact is that the British loathe Donald Trump

This is because he is the polar opposite of a ‘ Gentleman ‘, who has qualities the British admire. A fine example is Gareth Southgate.

To the British, a ‘ Gentleman ‘ is a man who is modest, well-mannered, self deprecating, quietly intelligent, considerate of other people’s feelings, and well-informed.

He is not vulgar, inflated, vain, boastful, noisily ignorant, sleazy and common as muck.

I hope this clears up any confusion.

[Photo not included.]

Unite Scotland turns out to be not all that unitey.

I’m especially impressed by that breezy “Unite believes that the strengthening and protection of the rights of trans people does not mean the rights of others will be diminished or affected.” Well that’s nice, but they offer no explanation of how that claim can possibly be true. How can it be true that “rights” such as the “right” for men who say they are trans to have everything that belongs to women and go everywhere that women go will not diminish or affect the rights of women? It can’t; the claim is absurd. Just making boastful assertions is not enough; you have to explain how your claim can be true.

They don’t bother with thinking or explaining or giving reasons, these goons, they just make Grand Statements consisting entirely of threadbare assertions we’ve all heard a billion times. They might as well stand around ringing a cowbell all day.

Julia Carrie Wong chats with “scholar” Sophie Lewis about those evil women who dare to call themselves feminists even though they don’t think men are women.

…just three weeks into Trump’s second term, the man responsible for stripping women in the US of the right to an abortion was declared a “feminist kween”, “feminist hero” and “feminist icon” by several prominent feminist writers in the UK.

The occasion for these declarations was Trump’s all-out assault on trans rights. Since taking office, the president has used executive orders to attempt to restrict the ability of trans Americans to travel, work, receive medical care, serve in the military, attend school and participate in women’s sports.

Are trans Americans foreigners who claim to be American but aren’t?

What this dishonest “journalist” is talking about of course is not letting people do all these things with fake identities and/or with the aid of cross-sex hormones. Newsflash: nobody gets to travel or work or serve in the military with fake ID. The whole point of ID is to make sure you are who you say you are.

How did we get here? How have we arrived at a place where self-identified feminists ally themselves with a man who has so extravagantly dedicated his personal and political lives to the humiliation, domination and degradation of women and girls?

I brought this question to Sophie Lewis, whose new book, Enemy Feminisms, out this week in the US, seeks to understand how and why some forms of feminism have diverged so fundamentally from others as to become, well, enemies.

Ya it’s a good question – how did you fuckers get your “feminism” so twisted that you celebrate men in skirts who take everything that belongs to women, while you demonize women who object? Please do tell us all about the thought process.

“It is difficult – I would say impossible – to say that [Terfism] is not feminism, that the philosophical and movement roots of their whole deal is not feminism,” Lewis said. “That’s the bad news. But the good news is that there were always other feminists fighting them tooth and nail.

“It hurts and confuses us to imagine that there are anti-liberatory feminisms, but I think when we do allow that and we do conceptually break that possibility open, that’s when it becomes possible to stake out our ground as an anti-colonial, proletarian, trans feminism,” she continued.

She continued, implying that feminists who think feminism is for women are also colonialists and anti-worker.

In Enemy Feminisms, Lewis also takes on the anti-pornography turn that some radical feminists took in the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of the Islamophobic femonationalist (“death by drone bomb is better (and more feminist) for women than life is under sharia law”)

So genuine feminism is Islamophilic? How does that work exactly? Islam does not repeat does not return the love.

Lewis is not the first to connect Terfism to the rising power of the global far right. The philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler has warned for years of the growing movement against “gender” – and the damage that feminist transphobia does to the coalition building needed to combat fascism. “Continuing the ‘anti-gender ideology’ discourse places contemporary ‘radical feminists’ in a position of woeful complicity with the key aims of new fascism,” they wrote in the 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender.

Butler wrote it therefore it’s obviously true, yeah? No.

Butler wrote a lot of things

Meanwhile, Bannon…

Steve Bannon has been accused of making a “Nazi” salute while giving a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday.

The incident occurred soon after Elon Musk, another top ally of Donald Trump, was accused of giving a Nazi salute on stage during an event celebrating the president’s January inauguration.

There’s a clip, and I gotta say, it’s a pretty feeble “Nazi salute” if it is one at all. It’s not as energized as Musk’s was – it’s more like a wave than a Nazi salute. But I’m not going to quibble. It’s not as if either of these guys is a staunch opponent of Nazi-style messages.

H/t NightCrow

Time for some Steve Bannon news.

He’s not a fan of the unelected overlord from South Africa.

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former White House chief strategist, has renewed his feud with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and a top Trump adviser, calling him a “parasitic illegal immigrant” in an interview published online on Tuesday.

Mr. Bannon made the comments in an interview with UnHerd, a British news site, that took place last week.

“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions,” Mr. Bannon told the interviewer.

Of course Trump too wants to play-act as god etc etc.

Despite his dramatic and fractious departure from the White House in 2017, Mr. Bannon became close with Mr. Trump again in the final year of Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Bannon is still a close ally and, more significantly, a popular figure within the Trump movement: His show, War Room, is watched closely by a number of Trump allies, as well as the president himself.

Musk and Bannon are like the two hit men in Fargo. Musk is the babbling jittery hyper guy played by Steve Buscemi, and Bannon is the huge sullen silent Swedish guy who axes him.

By all means follow the plot, guys.

This is an angle that doesn’t get enough attention.

To spell out the obvious, that’s a doctor who misunderstands some very basic things about the human body. It’s also a doctor who is self-obsessed enough to pretend to be the other sex and to impose that fantasy game on patients. Why would anyone want that from a doctor?

Wes Streeting objects.

Wes Streeting has raised concerns after a Telegraph investigation found that doctors who change gender are able to have past wrongdoings scrubbed from the public record.

The Health Secretary said the General Medical Council (GMC), which regulates doctors, should urgently overhaul its practices, adding the situation should “not have been allowed”.

The GMC holds a public register of all doctors, allowing the public to check whether a medic has been subject to restrictions or suspensions, or has been struck off.

However, on Thursday the watchdog admitted that it erases the public disciplinary history of doctors who change their gender identities.

It raises the prospect that medics seeking to hide a chequered disciplinary history could exploit the system by choosing to change their gender identity in order to erase their past. It also means a female patient who specifically requested a female doctor would be unable to find out if their [her] doctor was born a man [and thus is a man].

On Thursday night, Mr Streeting demanded immediate changes from the regulator. He told The Telegraph: “This is extremely concerning, and should not have been allowed to happen.”

But but but trans people are special so of course it should have been allowed to happen.

WHAT?!!

Doctors who change gender are allowed to scrub past wrongdoing from public record

Because changing gender=a new and improved doctor who has never done any harm to anyone?

Sandie Peggie’s case against NHS Fife for alleged harassment after the nurse raised concerns about a trans colleague has caused alarm among women and campaigners across the country. The NHS, she claims, was prioritising the rights of Dr Beth Upton, a trans doctor who was born male but insisted on using the women’s changing room, over her rights to a single-sex space.

Now, it can be revealed that the General Medical Council (GMC), which regulates doctors, takes an even more extreme stance on trans medics – effectively scrubbing the public disciplinary history of doctors who change their identities in this way.

“If a doctor had received a historical sanction [i.e. the suspension is no longer in place] prior to transitioning, this information would not be available on their new public-facing record on the medical register,” says a GMC spokesman. The GMC confirms that Dr Upton is one of 62 doctors to have been given new registrations under different GMC numbers.

It’s reminding me of The Church and the concept of sainthood. Swapping gender=sainthood.

Except of course that it doesn’t. Rather the opposite: it encourages narcissism, bullying, dominance, entitlement, and similar repellent qualities. Look at Upton just for one.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Congress is supine.

Musk warned Republican lawmakers in December that he was compiling a “naughty list” of members who buck Trump’s agenda. He also pledged shortly after Election Day that his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries” next year.

A Republican senator told The Hill that Musk’s wealth makes primary threats “a bigger deal.”

One hopes that at some point, it will become a badge of honour to have opposed Trump. Unfortunately, that time is not now. What America needs are Republican members of Congress who realize Trump is destroying the country. They have to stop being okay with that. By supporting a man who famously refused to show his own tax return, you’ve surrendered the tax information of all Americans to his attack dog. It shouldn’t make a difference whether the billionaire digging through this information to which he should not have been given access is named Soros or Musk; trespass is trespass. Trump does not own the “property” to which he has given Musk free admission. Republicans have to learn to care for their country’s future more than their own political career. They have to stand up, and stop being cowards. I know, a tall order. But your options and opportunities are running out; the more obvious and likely ones have been all missed or wasted. We’re all clinging to hopes and dreams that become increasingly improbable with every day and every Trump transgression of tradition, norm and law. Once you’ve run out of horses, it’s perfectly natural to keep praying for unicorns. But there comes a time when you have to stop wishing and start walking. The road isn’t going to get any shorter.

These are not normal times. This is not a normal president. Republicans have made a choice, and it’s the wrong one. Trump has taken over their country. The longer they go along with him, the harder it will be for anyone to take it back. How long before it’s too late is anybody’s guess. The current batch of Republicans still thinks they’re on a pleasure cruise. They need to take a closer look the tour itinerary. Do they really want to go where it’s heading? Is this what they signed up for?* Is this what they swore to protect? They’ll think that everything is great so long as it’s their opponents who are being thrown to the sharks. They are not pampered guests and passengers, they are rubber-stamping dupes and hostages. In reality, if they get in the Captain’s way, they’re next up to be chum. They need to wake up and smell the fascism. Time to put down the cocktails and step away from the buffet. Before long you’re going to try to hide that photo of which you’re so proud, you sitting there, smiling at the Captain’s table.

It’s going to be hard, but they’re going to have to think again. They have to imagine that they’re storming the beach of a hostile, occupying power, because that’s what Trump is. Liberation won’t happen if the troops are all milling about on board the landing craft, too afraid to be the first to step and wade ashore because they might be primaried. It’s criminal that the service and sacrifice of millions of Americans who fought against tyranny is being defiled by odious cowards trying to save their pensions or book deals, all in the service of a vile monster like Trump.

*Yes, I know that for far too many of them, this is exactly what they signed up for. Trump’s malignancy was not news.

A joke but not a joke.

Donald Trump has called himself a king.

In a post to Truth Social on Wednesday, Feb. 19, the president, 78, praised his own efforts in attempting to revoke revoking New York City’s recently reinstated congestion pricing system.

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan and all of New York, is SAVED,” he wrote, adding, “LONG LIVE THE KING.”

Hur hur, so funny, he’s such a card, hur hur.

Weird that other presidents haven’t made that joke though. Maybe they thought it would be inappropriate, unfunny, narcissistic, trashy?

Also of course you don’t save Manhattan by promoting more and more and more traffic. Manhattan isn’t built for a lot of traffic. It’s a skinny island: there isn’t room for a lot of traffic, so the more of it you have the more gridlocked it gets.

Shortly afterwards, the official White House Instagram account shared a fake Time magazine cover, depicting Trump wearing a crown. In place of the magazine’s title was Trump’s name in big letters — and again, at the left corner, read the words, “Long live the king.”

He’s not the king, he’s the hitler.

H/t iknklast

More terrifying (and terrorizing) every day.

Robert Reich:

Musk and his associates have not only burrowed into the Treasury’s payments system; they are now burrowing into the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration.

They are gaining access to the most sensitive personal information about Americans available anywhere, along with computer code capable of altering that information and those systems. The Muskrats have been able to turn off government funding without Congress’s consent, even in the face of federal court orders to turn the funding back on.

This is blatantly illegal, yet Congress remains silent.

Congress is supine because Republicans are in charge, and Musk has also become Trump’s hatchet man — threatening Republican members of Congress if they deviate from Trump.

Iowa’s Republican Senator Joni Ernst was firmly set against Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense until Musk hinted that he’d finance a primary challenger to Ernst, who’s up for reelection next year. Presto: Ernst supported Hegseth.

Indiana’s Republican Senator Todd Young expressed concern about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence until Musk tweeted against him. A besieged Young spoke with JD Vance, who arranged a call with Musk. Presto: Young announced he would back Gabbard.

Musk warned Republican lawmakers in December that he was compiling a “naughty list” of members who buck Trump’s agenda. He also pledged shortly after Election Day that his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries” next year.

A Republican senator told The Hill that Musk’s wealth makes primary threats “a bigger deal.”

Musk’s financial and political power have been enough to intimidate even the mainstream media. An advertisement set to run in The Washington Post yesterday calling for Musk to be fired from his role in government was abruptly canceled, according to Common Cause, one of the groups that had ordered the ad. When asked why the Post had pulled the ad, the Post said it was not at liberty to give a reason.

When and if America ever wrests back control of our government, we must remember this: The combination of great wealth and great power — epitomized by Elon Musk — is destroying American democracy.

Oligarchy is the enemy of democracy.

And the enemy is well dug in.

A news flash from Jonathan Gallant:

President Trump has issued an executive order, cancelling the name of the FDR Drive along the east side of Manhattan in New York City.   Asserting that FDR deserves no special recognition for leading the USA through World War II, President Trump asserted that there wouldn’t have been a world war at all if he had been president.  “The Poles just brought it all on themselves when they provoked Germany by signing a military alliance with Britain,” he said.  “Poland could have made a deal with Herr Hitler, by turning over Danzig and the Polish Corridor to him, and then there wouldn’t have been any war.” 

  President Trump added that FDR’s administration had prolonged the war by sending Lend-Lease military aid to Britain after hostilities broke out.  He added that it was stupid to provide all that support without its being secured by the promise of US property rights to key British resources, such as Cornish tin, Welsh slate, and Marmite.  

Lies Social

Liberal party will allow women to tell the truth.

The Liberal Democrats have been forced to allow women’s rights campaigners who believe in biological sex to have equal footing with other groups after claims that they had been “vilified and censured” for their beliefs.

Except they’re not beliefs, they’re facts.

Facts are beliefs in the banal sense that people may believe them, but it’s misleading at best and dishonest plus manipulative at worst to call facts “beliefs.” It’s not a mere belief that jumping off a tall building will cause death. It’s not a mere belief that fire burns, that rain is wet, that Antarctica is chilly. Women’s rights campaigners don’t “believe in biological sex”; we know that biological sense is real and that trans identity is a nebulous hodgepodge of stupid ideas.

Sir Ed Davey’s party have agreed to “draw a line under this period of intolerance” and allow Liberal Voice for Women (LVW) — the gender critical section of the party — to be allowed to hold events, have exhibition stands and place adverts after a previous ban.

A previous ban on women who know that men are not women, and refuse to say that men are women. In a party that calls itself liberal. You couldn’t make it up.

Zoe Hollowood, the chair of the Liberal Voice for Women, said: “For too long gender critical members have been vilified and censured in the party for their ordinary belief in the immutability and importances of sex.”

Or rather their ordinary recognition of the immutability and importance of sex. If we approach the edge of a cliff we don’t believe it would be dangerous to keep going, we know it would.

The agreement was confirmed in a letter to LVW from Mike Dixon, the party’s chief executive, who wrote: “The Liberal Democrats recognise that Liberal Voice for Women is entitled not to be discriminated against in respect of the lawfully held protected beliefs”.

Except they’re not beliefs, they’re just ordinary humdrum reality. Pretending that men can be women relies on a belief; not doing so is just recognition of reality.

The wording matters, obviously. Trans ideology is all about lies and fiction and fantasies while rejection of trans ideology is just a matter of everyday facts that we all know, even if some of us pretend we don’t know.

A Liberal Democrat spokesman said: “We are proud to be a liberal party where our members have a range of views on all sorts of issues, but come together to discuss them in a friendly and constructive way. That’s what Lib Dem conference is all about.

Well, I gotta say, the Liberal Party shouldn’t be proud to have a range of views on whether or not men are women.

Side with the aggressor much?

President Trump escalated his attacks against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday by calling him “a dictator without elections.”

Why it matters: The smear marks a new low in the deteriorating U.S.-Ukraine relationship. It comes as the Trump administration is negotiating a deal with the Kremlin to end Russia’s war in Ukraine without Kyiv’s participation in the talks.

Remember when FDR negotiated a deal with Hitler to end Germany’s war in Europe without Europe’s participation in the talks?

 “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered.”

…

Trump has never called Russian President Vladimir Putin a dictator.

Never has and never will.

So…we mustn’t oppress trans people by having criteria for what “trans” is and how anyone knows who is trans and who isn’t, but at the same time we also must agree that trans people are indeed trans (because they say they are). So…what does “trans” mean then? What is it? Why is there so much noisy pressure to give trans people whatever they ask for at any moment? What are we even talking about?

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Accountable to the pumpkin.

Unfortunately, we’ve been sliding toward de facto dictatorship for a long, long time. Presidential administrations, regardless of party, have a history of expanding executive power and diminishing congressional authority as defined by the Constitution. (Or as Jon Stewart put it, “Again, for some reason, we have given presidents the power of a king. And then we say, oh, by the way, with that power, you’re not going to get all, like, kingly and shit on us, right?”)

  While this particular move directly asserts White House control over independent agencies, the broader pattern of presidents’ centralizing power at the expense of Congress has been ongoing for literal decades. This Trump order isn’t exactly an outlier, not even from what Democratic presidents have done.

– Both Democratic and Republican administrations have increasingly bypassed Congress in military actions (e.g., Libya intervention under Obama, Syria strikes under Biden), avoiding formal war declarations. The last time Congress actually did its Constitutionally defined job and formally declared war was over eighty years ago, in 1942. That means every single war the US has been … not a war?

– The Obama administration increased White House oversight over regulatory agencies, particularly through executive orders such as Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review (EO 13563) and Regulatory Planning and Review (EO 12866, which Obama reaffirmed). These required independent agencies to justify their regulations under cost-benefit analysis frameworks set by the White House.

– The Biden administration used executive orders and agency directives to enforce major policy changes (e.g., student loan forgiveness, OSHA’s vaccine mandates) without clear congressional authorization. His regulatory review changes (EO 14094) further centralized regulatory power under the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), similar to Trump’s move.

– Under Dodd-Frank (2010), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was set up to be largely independent of congressional budgetary control, with funds coming directly from the Federal Reserve. This effectively removed oversight from Congress, paralleling Trump’s attempt to consolidate oversight under the executive branch.

– Through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the Obama administration effectively redefined immigration enforcement priorities without congressional approval. This set a precedent for the executive branch to determine de facto immigration policy, bypassing legislative debate. It’s not like that came back to bite anyone in the ass, though.

– Presidents frequently declare national emergencies to bypass congressional gridlock. Obama declared an emergency over the Swine Flu, while Biden extended COVID-19 emergency powers long after the pandemic’s peak. This follows a trend where executive declarations serve as justification for unilateral policy changes.

Sometimes it feels like America just wants to live in a dictatorship. Well, at least a dictatorship run by the people on our side. That’s certainly the way we behave.

Another winner…

Not, oddly enough, a press release in which he admits he’s a cheating asshole.

Dude has the nerve to complain of “spreading hate.”

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

I watched Sean Hannity’s Fox News interview tonight with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

But I am still not sure who’s in charge. If there is a headline from the interview, it is that the president of the United States feels that he requires the services of a multibillionaire to enforce his executive orders. Trump complained that he would write these “beautiful” executive orders, which would then languish in administrative limbo. Musk, for his part, explained that the president is the embodiment of the nation and that resisting his orders is the same as thwarting the will of the people. Hannity, of course, enthusiastically supported all of this whining about how hard it is to govern a superpower.

Of course the president is not “the embodiment of the nation.” That kind of thinking is used to justify royalty, but presidents are definitely not supposed to be royalty. Trump’s galactic vanity does not contradict that.

The interview was arduous both for the viewer and for Hannity, because everyone who interviews Trump must always contend with the president’s apparent inability to hold a single thought for very long. Hannity, as usual, tried to throw softballs; Trump, as usual, missed every pitch. Hannity at one point noted that Trump has “become a student of history” and then asked how the Framers of the Constitution would view his efforts to rein in the bureaucracy. Trump verbally wandered about before returning to his talking points about Musk, who he said is “amazing” and “cares.” So say James Madison and the other Founders, apparently.

Seriously? Did Hannity really think Trump could respond intelligently to that question? Surely not. Surely it’s obvious to everyone that Trump’s brain is melting away, and he can’t respond intelligently to anything. You’d think Fox people would be careful to throw him softballs.