Trump is melting down on his pretend-twitter. I took a deep breath and went directly to the source to collect his exclamations.

Even though I am as innocent as a person can be, and despite MY campaign being spied on by the Radical Left, the FISA COURT being lied to and defrauded, all of the many Hoaxes and Scams that were illegally placed on me by very sick & demented people, and without even mentioning the many crimes of Joe and Hunter Biden, all revealed in great detail in the Laptop From Hell, it looks more and more like the Fake News Media is pushing hard for the Sleaze to do something that should not be done!

All very convincing.

Joe Biden said he knew nothing about the Break-In of Mar-a-Lago or, the greatest political attack in the history of the U.S. Does anybody really believe this???

Define “this.”

The Radical Left Democrat prosecutors are illegally trying to circumvent, for purely political gain, the Presidential Record’s Act, under which I have done absolutely nothing wrong. It can not be circumvented, for me or any other President. They illegally Raided my home, and took things that should not have been taken. They even broke into my safe, an unthinkable act!

Things. The took things. Things that should notof been tooken. How dare they broke into my safe where I hid the best shit.

People are having a lot of innocent fun with this –

Prepare to shed a tear.

Alix Fitzgerald takes a deep breath, conscious of articulating* her point in the clearest possible terms. “The only way I can describe this,” she begins, her voice tinged with sadness, “is that it’s like grief. “It’s like something has been ripped away.”

*[conscious of the need to articulate]

Fitzgerald, a proud trans woman, is mourning the loss of rugby. She had been an active member of East London RFC women’s team, but the Rugby Football Union’s ban on players “assigned male at birth” in female contact rugby last month prematurely spelt the end of her career.

I don’t give one single teeny tiny shit. Why should I? What about the woman who isn’t on the team because Fitzgerald, a man, is? What about her grief? What about what was ripped away from her? Why are we being nudged to feel lachrymose sympathy for a selfish man intruding on women and taking one woman’s place?

The rationale for the controversial decision, which echoed others made by British Cycling and swimming’s world governing body this year, was simple. Given the limited scientific research currently available on trans women, rugby’s governing body argued that the safety of female players could no longer be guaranteed.

The decision doesn’t need a “rationale.” Women’s sports are for women. That’s the whole point of them.

Fearing a ban on trans women was imminent, the 54-year-old front rower turned out for every single game for her club last year – a record she is fiercely proud of.

Women don’t need men being fiercely proud of stealing places in women’s sports. Men are not the underdogs in this scenario, so their ferocity is not that of the plucky underdog but instead that of the bigger stronger faster overdog, so get out of here with that manipulative crap.

On the day the ban was passed, Fitzgerald chose to stay at home, numbed, she says, “by a huge sense of rejection”. The phone rang. It was a member from her rugby club who wanted to check in on her. “My wife, Anne, picked it up. I couldn’t take the call. It was the second worst day of my life,” she reflects.

Diddums. Has he ever thought about how the woman he’s replacing feels?

Updating to add:

One trans woman who did turn up to voice her disappointment was Julie Curtiss. The Hove RFC player had been liaising with the RFU’s welfare officers in early June – more than a month before news of the ban on trans women was announced – having been invited to play for the Sussex women’s veteran team at a competition this autumn.

“I personally don’t think that the people who are running around and trying to influence various sports bodies have women’s sport at heart,” insists Curtiss. “I don’t think any of them are particularly interested in women’s sport, ultimately. I think their main thing is to try to systematically go through each of the sectors of society where we want to exist and kick us out.”  

So we’re supposed to think Curtiss has women’s sport at heart? Ha. Curtiss has Curtiss at heart.

After the vote, the body reached out to Curtiss and suggested there were several other avenues she could explore, such as coaching or refereeing. While she does have aspirations to coach, doing so right now would be “tacitly agreeing to what the RFU has done” and a reminder of the marginalisation of the trans community across sport.

You can’t do both. You can’t both mess with your hormones and be “included” across sport. That’s not “marginalisation,” it’s just sport.

“It’s taken me back into that fear place, where I’m reminded by institutions that I’m not ‘woman’ enough,” says Curtiss. “It’s really hard to quantify exactly what that means but it has really knocked my self-confidence and my ability to operate in society.”

It hasn’t made the slightest dent in his self-involvement though.

Same old smoke and mirrors:

Trans golfer sparks outrage as she attempts to qualify for ladies PGA tour

Outrage why? Because the golfer is not a “she.” Lying in the headline is not a good look for a newspaper.

A Scottish golfer who is attempting to qualify for the ladies’ PGA tour has sparked a fresh row over whether transgender athletes should compete in women’s events.

The row is over whether men should compete in women’s events.

Hailey Davidson, who became the first trans golfer to win a professional tournament last year, is trying to earn a Ladies Professional Gold Association (LPGA) tour card.

If successful, Davidson will become the first trans golfer to earn the card.

He’s not a “trans golfer,” he’s a trans woman, i.e. a man. Because he’s a man, he shouldn’t be competing against women. It isn’t fair.

Davidson began hormone therapy in 2015 and has undergone gender reassignment surgery. Before the therapy, the golfer competed as a male.

No he didn’t “compete as a male,” he simply was a male, and still is. He competed against other men.

And while some have accused her of having an unfair advantage against other female competitors, Davidson claims that some of her rivals can hit the ball further after she lost 30 yards from her drive after undergoing therapy.

Oh just stop. Stop trying to cheat. Have some dignity, along with a sense of fairness.

Davidson has previously claimed that the outrage is “not about protecting women’s sports or me having an advantage, it’s just that you don’t like trans people.”

It’s that we don’t like men invading women’s sports. Get out of it.

Jon makes an important point.

Politics, justice, freedom struggles, equal rights campaigns – none of that is about “kindness.” Keep your damn kindness and just give us what’s rightfully ours.

Kindness is a good thing in its place, but expanded out of its place it can be intrusive and patronizing and ultimately infuriating. Give us our due and then don’t bother us.

Helen Lewis says social justice crusades are a kind of substitute religion for The Young.

In the U.S., the nonreligious are younger and more liberal than the population as a whole. Perhaps, then, it isn’t a coincidence that they are also the group most likely to be involved in high-profile social-justice blowups, particularly the type found on college campuses. They’ve substituted one religion for another…

…Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values.

See also: those annoying yard signs (I bet you don’t have them in the UK – you luckies) that advertise the inhabitants’ virtues. The one I hate most leads with “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE” and then lists the pieties. The pieties are mostly quite acceptable pieties, but I’m extremely tired of the smug self-admiring advertisement of them.

As politics has usurped religion, it has borrowed its underlying concepts, sometimes putting them into new words. John McWhorter, a linguist and Atlantic contributing writer, recently published a best-selling book reflecting on what he sees as the excesses of America’s racial-justice movement. Its working title was “The Elect,” after the Calvinist idea of a group chosen by God for salvation. (In the end, it was published under the more provocative name Woke Racism.) “The hyper-woke—who were firing people right and left, and shaming people right and left—think that they’re seeing further than most people, that they understand the grand nature of things better than the ordinary person can,” McWhorter told me. “To them, they’re elect.”

And being elect means they need to chastise the unelect.

Helen points out that Trump fans are another kind of elect.

There’s no escape.

Could it be that forced pregnancy will keep Republicans from taking over?

Abortion and Donald Trump will both appear on November’s ballot. On Tuesday, Pat Ryan, a Democrat and a decorated Iraq war veteran, upset Republican Marc Molinaro in a special congressional election in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley. Ryan won 52-48 after pre-election polls had painted him as the clear underdog.

…

On the campaign trail Ryan made abortion a central issue. “Choice is [on] the ballot, but we won’t go back,” he posted to Facebook hours before the polls opened. “Freedom is under attack, but it’s ours to defend.”

…

There is a clear backlash against the US supreme court’s evisceration of the rights to privacy and personal autonomy.

Whose rights to privacy and personal autonomy? Not everyone’s; only women’s. I doubt it’s mere clumsy writing that made Lloyd Green obscure that fact. Avoiding the word “women” has become second nature to many journalists and opinion writers.

Tudor Dixon, Michigan’s Republican candidate for governor, spoke of the upside of a 14-year-old rape victim carrying the child to term. “The bond that those two people made and the fact that out of that tragedy there was healing through that baby, it’s something that we don’t think about,” Dixon told an interviewer.

Weirdly, even there he manages to avoid saying “girl.”

Anyway, I hope he’s right about the backlash.

From last week:

A female comic and healthcare worker says she has been spat at on the street and shunned by long-time colleagues for daring to put on a performance about biological women.

Award-winning funny woman Elaine Miller’s Fringe show Viva Your Vulva: The Hole Story has been the target of abuse from those judging her as a “transphobe”. She says that at the end of the Edinburgh show she makes a reference to the importance of language in getting across healthcare messaging.

Like not saying “people” should get tested for cervical or testicular cancer? That kind of importance of language?

Her crime she says is not mentioning transwomen because they are “not relevant to the topic” of female biological anatomy.

Ya that kind.

In an interview with the Scottish Daily Express, Ms Miller said the show is about anyone with female anatomy, including trans men and non-binary individuals. She said: “I think my crime is that it’s only about female people and I don’t mention trans women at all because they are not relevant to the topic and that seems to have upset people.”

You know, somebody should lock Trump and trans women (yes all of them) in a room to duke it out for Who Is Most Self-obsessed On The Planet.

Trump thinks “executive privilege” is something like a guarantee of absolute monarchy – a magic holy term that empowers him to have take keep do say deny lie about whatever he wants. He thinks all he has to do is say the documents are covered by “executive privilege” and that’s the last word on the subject. In short he has a child’s idea of what being president means and what having been president means.

That’s why his exchanges with the National Archives were at cross-purposes.

The National Archives and Records Administration recovered more than 100 documents bearing classified markings, totaling more than 700 pages, from an initial batch of 15 boxes retrieved from Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, according to newly public government correspondence with the Trump legal team.

The numbers make clear the large volume of secret government documents recovered months ago from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, well before FBI officials returned there with a search warrant on Aug. 8 and removed an additional 11 sets of classified records. The warrant reveals an FBI investigation into the potential unlawful possession of the records as well as obstruction of justice.

In Trump’s tiny mind there can’t be such a thing as “unlawful possession” of documents from his Absolute Monarchy.

The figures on documents were included in a May 10 letter in which acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall told a lawyer for Trump, Evan Corcoran, that the Biden administration would not be honoring the former president’s protective claims of executive privilege over the documents.

Does not compute. They’re not “claims,” they’re Absolute Reality just as he was Absolute Ruler. He was the god-king so the papers from his god-kingship are protected by his godly kingyness. Executive privilege. Woman man person camera tv.

The archivist’s letter says the Justice Department had found “no precedent for an assertion of executive privilege by a former President against an incumbent President to prevent the latter” from obtaining from the National Archives presidential records that belong to the federal government and that are needed for current government business.

“Precedent”? What is this “precedent” of which you speak?

Once again the question arises: what about copies? Why isn’t the reporting explaining to us why there is so much agitation over The Documents with no mention of copies?

Anyway. Rolling Stone reports:

IN THE WEEKS after the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, former President Donald Trump repeatedly made a simple-sounding but extraordinary ask: he wanted his lawyers to get “my documents” back from federal law enforcement.

Trump wasn’t merely referring to the alleged trove of attorney-client material that he insists was scooped up by the feds during the raid, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. The ex-president has been demanding that his team find a way to recover “all” of the official documents that Trump has long referred to as “mine” — including the highly sensitive and top secret ones.   

Sources close to Trump agree with outside legal experts that such a sweeping legal maneuver would be a long-shot, at best.  “I hate to break it to the [former] president, but I do not think he is going to get all [the] top-secret documents back,” says one Trump adviser. “That ship has probably sailed.”

But why is it implied that the documents are unique? Why wouldn’t Trump have multiple copies in multiple places? What are we missing? Is it that the originals have copy-proof Somethings that mean copies are essentially worthless? Or what?

Oh dear. That sounds way too much like “What is this drivel, throw it away and hand in the actual assignment by tomorrow or you get an F for the course.”

All the narcissism.

“Buckle up everybody it’s time to talk about my”

Stop right there.

Updating to add: It’s a parody.

“You can’t criticize or dispute ____, ____ is a mother’s child!”

The Daily Record rants:

The mum of a Scots transwoman who is competing in a women’s professional golf tournament has hit out at Judy Murray after she criticised her daughter’s place in the competition.

Why “the mum”? Why baby talk? Other people’s mothers aren’t “the mums,” they’re the mothers. We’re not all 6. Also why bother with a link for “mum”? Also stop saying “hit out at” when you mean “disagreed with” or “criticized.”

But the real point is, that’s not “her daughter,” it’s her son, which is why it’s not fair for him to be competing in a women’s tournament.

Hailey Davidson, from Stair in Ayrshire, became the first transgender woman to earn a Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tour card and is currently taking part in the LPGA and Epson Tour Qualifying School in Palm Springs, America.

That is, Hailey Davidson is cheating a woman out of a place in the LPGA and Epson Tour Qualifying School in Palm Springs, America. It’s not cute.

Tennis coach Judy Murray branded the decision to allow the trans athlete to compete as ‘wrong’ and unfair on the other competitors.

Sharing a tweet about the golfer, the tennis coach wrote: “No. Not fair at all. Protect women’s sport. Listen to the facts, the scientists and the medics. This is wrong.”

As, of course, it is.

Sandra, who spoke to the Record from her home in Florida, where she lives with Hailey said: “Shame on Judy Murray for attacking another mother’s child.”

That’s idiotic. Every single human being is “another mother’s child.” Trump is a mother’s child. Putin is a mother’s child. Mass shooters are all mothers’ children. Torturers are mothers’ children. Even men who claim to be women are mothers’ children; that doesn’t mean we can’t say they’re wrong.

“You do not know my daughter Hailey and most importantly you know absolutely nothing about transgender men or women and therefore have no rights whatsoever to give your opinion on something you know nothing about.”

How does “Sandra” know what Judy Murray knows about trans people? Even if she does know, what right does she have to tell Murray not to talk about men in women’s sports?

None.

This is an interesting point – by claiming executive privilege he’s confessed.

Lawyers are laughing at Trump’s filing.

It might be tempting to scrutinize the filing as if it were a serious legal document, submitted in a credible way. That would be a mistake. Orin Kerr, a conservative law professor at UC Berkeley, noted overnight that many actual lawyers “are giggling at Trump’s motion, and how poorly it was done.”

Go on, just say it. Badly. The word is “badly.” There’s no need to soften it with “poorly.” Trump isn’t poor, he’s bad.

Among the many problems is the fact that it’s oddly late. The FBI executed its search warrant on Monday, Aug. 8. At that point, federal law enforcement officials reclaimed classified materials the former president brought to his glorified country club, taking stock of what he improperly took. Two weeks later, Trump’s lawyers went to court, apparently in the hopes that the FBI would stop reviewing the documents.

The FBI, with once voice: “Oops! Sorry! Our bad!”

The idea that the FBI’s search was “shockingly aggressive” is even more difficult to take seriously. The Justice Department tried a series of lesser means, including subpoenas and in-person meetings in the hope of avoiding this step. When Team Trump refused to cooperate, the FBI went to court, obtained a search warrant, and executed it in the least aggressive way possible: The bureau sent plain-clothed agents who coordinated in advance with the Secret Service.

I’m guessing that “shockingly aggressive” is trumpese for lèse-majesté. One doesn’t rifle the cupboards of the god-emperor.

The former president keeps calling it an illegal “break-in” and “raid,” hoping that the public will imagine swarms of agents in tactical gear, pointing assault weapons at scared Mar-a-Lago customers. That’s plainly absurd.

To adults it is. Trump aims everything toward people as childish in their thinking as he is. It turns out there are a hell of a lot of them.

Perhaps most entertaining was an accompanying written statement from Trump, which read in part, “This Mar-a-Lago Break-In, Search, and Seizure was illegal and unconstitutional, and we are taking all actions necessary to get the documents back, which we would have given to them without the necessity of the despicable raid of my home, so that I can give them to the National Archives until they are required for the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.”

Would have given to them when? He’s only had a year and a half already. Also they’re not his to “give” to the National Archives, much less to grab back for his “library.”

That said, misguided court filings sometimes work, and in this instance, the case was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon — a Trump-appointed Federalist Society member, who was confirmed after Trump’s 2020 defeat, and who has a reputation as a far-right jurist.

Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum.

It never ceases to amaze me the way “inclusive” is for trans people but never ever for women. I still say I was never given the option to agree or disagree with the proposition “women are no longer an oppressed group in any way.”

See by giving customers a choice of male or female changing rooms they’re not being “an inclusive retailer,” because they’re excluding female people who don’t want to risk being spied on or assaulted while they try on a bra. It’s stupid and mindless to call it “inclusive” to give men carte blanche to do that.

What an interesting claim:

Regarding Julia Mason and Leor Sapir’s op-ed “The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Dubious Transgender Science” (Aug. 18): In its recommendations for caring for transgender and gender-diverse young people, the AAP advises pediatricians to offer developmentally appropriate care that is oriented toward understanding and appreciating the youth’s gender experience. This care is nonjudgmental, includes families and allows questions and concerns to be raised in a supportive environment. This is what it means to “affirm” a child or teen; it means destigmatizing gender variance and promoting a child’s self-worth. Gender-affirming care can be lifesaving. It doesn’t push medical treatments or surgery; for the vast majority of children, it recommends the opposite.

That’s what “gender-affirming care” means? It doesn’t mean cutting off breasts or penises, or constructing new “front holes” or penises from bits of colon or chunks of arm?

Huh. That’s not how Boston Children’s Hospital uses it. Someone should let them know.

Law-mavens are following the Maralago adventures with keen interest. [Updating to add: the bit about not having a lawyer turns out to be a mistake. H/t Screechy]

Typical Trump, too – always with the overkill. It’s like that hideous gilded apartment in Trump Tower.

The NY Times on Trump’s lavish archive of classified documents:

The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.

There are levels here. He wasn’t supposed to have any documents: they were never his to keep. Multiply that by a very big number for classified documents. Multiply again for the huge number of them.

In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.

More than 300 separate crimes.

The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.

And all this is happening, let’s not forget, at a hotel. A place with hundreds of people wandering around at all times. Trump stole hundreds of classified documents and kept them at his hotel.

Mr. Trump’s allies insist that the president had a “standing order” to declassify material that left the Oval Office for the White House residence, and have claimed that the General Services Administration, not Mr. Trump’s staff, packed the boxes with the documents.

Why would that make it ok? Trump’s saying “declassify all this stuff, I’m taking it home” doesn’t change the nature of the stuff.

The Society of Authors has advice for us.

A lot of authors I follow are annoyed by the condescension of “play nicely.” I read some of the thing we were told to have a peep at, and was struck by a certain omission.

The Society of Authors is committed to promoting professional behaviour throughout all its activities, and to tackling and preventing bullying, harassment and racism in all their forms.

Why racism only? Why not sexism? (There are others, too – classism, xenophobia, etc – but women are half of everyone, so we’re a particularly big item to ignore.)

Bullying, harassment and racism have no place on our premises, in our communications, or in any other environment in which we operate.

But sexism does have a place there?

Our approach

We condemn any kind of racist, hate or unprofessional speech.

Again – why specify racism and leave all the other kinds of hate speech unspecified? In particular why leave the one that targets half the population unspecified?

I asked them but I don’t suppose they’ll answer.