Holy shit, now he’s going for a joy ride to wave to “fans,” thus putting a bunch of Secret Service agents in extreme danger.

Cool, so the president’s tame doc admits he lied in the briefing yesterday. That’s fine then. No doubt tomorrow he’ll admit he lied in today’s.

In a jarring news conference Sunday, Trump’s doctors said that even though the President has had at least two concerning drops in oxygen levels, they are hoping he could be discharged as early as tomorrow from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Because he’s barely sick at all. Really. You can trust us on this.

Conley again failed to answer basic questions about the President’s condition and admitted Sunday that he had omitted those alarming drops in the President’s oxygen levels during Saturday’s news conference because he wanted to “reflect the upbeat attitude” that the team and the President had about his condition and didn’t want “to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction.”

I guess he means steer everyone’s perception of the course of illness in another direction? He can’t steer the course of the illness itself by saying things to the press. Anyway, that’s quite an admission. “Yes, I lied about it yesterday to make it sound better.” Oh. Ok then.

Conley acknowledged that his evasive answers “came off that we were trying to hide something” but said that “wasn’t necessarily true,” adding that the President is “doing really well” and is responding to treatment.

Was it contingently true? (Yes.)

The President has experienced “two episodes of transient drops in his oxygen saturation,” Conley said Sunday. The first significant episode occurred late Friday morning when, Conley said, the President had “a high fever and his oxygen saturation was transiently dipping below 94%.” The President was given oxygen at that point, Conley said, answering a question he had evaded during his Saturday briefing.

“After about a minute on only two liters, his saturation levels were back over 95%. He stayed on that for about an hour maybe, and it was off and gone,” Conley said Sunday. Later on Friday, Conley said, Trump was out of bed, moving around the White House residence with only mild symptoms.

On Saturday, the President’s oxygen level dropped again “to about 93%,” Conley said. “We watched it and it returned back up.” But the incident led doctors to start treating Trump with the steroid drug dexamethasone, which has been shown to help patients with Covid-19. It is typically given to patients on supplemental oxygen or ventilation.

I.e. patients who have very severe cases.

How about the lungs? Any damage?

He offered no detail about what X-rays or CT scans have shown about whether there has been any damage to the President’s lungs.

“There’s some expected findings, but nothing of any major clinical concern,” Conley said, not explaining whether they were expected findings in the lungs of a normal patient or a Covid-19 patient.

Plus the thing about admitting he lied yesterday.

Meadows made the mistake of trying to get some of the truth out, so now Trump is pissed off at him.

Earlier on Saturday, Meadows had also attempted to signal that the President’s initial condition was more serious when he spoke to pool reporters as an unnamed official after Conley’s briefing that morning. But his identity was later revealed by The New York Times and The Associated Press, and Trump was furious at his chief of staff for contradicting the White House physician’s upbeat assessment, two sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN’s Jim Acosta Sunday.

How dare anyone who works for Trump tell us the truth?

A separate White House official confirmed Trump is unhappy with Meadows, as the chief of staff is now viewed by Trump advisers as having damaged the credibility of the current medical briefings on the President’s bout with the coronavirus.

Ah right. Meadows “damaged the credibility” of the briefings because he told some of the truth, while Trump wants the briefings to be lies.

Dude’s last words are going to be lies.

And another another one of these.

Oh those attempts to “reach out and educate” – by which they mean attempts to accuse and bully. For some reason despite all these attempts to accuse and bully, she continues to click “like” on some tweets, and “LGBT+ Labour Scotland,” or the people in control of its Twitter account, wants to force her to stop doing that and instead follow their orders. It is UNACCEPTABLE for her to have her own views; she must be forced to exchange her own views for those of LGBT+ Labour Scotland, and have the whip withdrawn as well.

What does that mean?

Defying a three-line whip is very serious, and has occasionally resulted in the whip being withdrawn from an MP or Lord. This means that the Member is effectively expelled from their party (but keeps their seat) and must sit as an independent until the whip is restored.

These twerps want a woman MP expelled from Labour for liking tweets that they disapprove of; they want that and they’re trying to make it happen.

Open season on women innit.

The i-word is the clue – by “women’s rights” she means “men’s rights.”

The Kingdom of the Netherlands fully supports inclusive women’s rights movements around the world. The effects of COVID-19, the pandemic, are felt by all of us. But women and girls are as always disproportionately affected. It’s a shadow pandemic, and it worries me deeply.

It’s good to see a government minister worrying about women.

That’s why today I’m delighted to share this stage

…with a man.

That’s a bit of a bump.

with someone who deeply inspires me, Nikkie de Jager.

Who is that? A trans woman whose claim to fame is giving tutorials on makeup.

Thanks for worrying about women.

H/t Tineke

Oh lord he’s done it again. Wouldn’t you think he’d learn? Or at least that the people around him would learn? WE CAN SEE THE BLANK PAPER.

President Donald Trump was seen in a photo taken at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center apparently signing a blank piece of paper with a marker, further undermining the credibility of the White House when it comes to the president’s health.

And further undermining anyone’s ability to take this bozo seriously.

The White House on Saturday night released pictures of the president working at the hospital, where he remained for a second night after he and First Lady Melania Trump both tested positive for the coronavirus.

Or rather, pictures of the president pretending to work. Pictures of the president pretending to work in the manner of a small child, who mimics the outward gestures of adult Working while having no clue what the work actually entails. I sit at desk, I have paper, I have sharpie, I write on paper with sharpie, I working.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a senior aide, shared one the pictures on her Twitter page, adding: “Nothing can stop him from working for the American people. RELENTLESS!”

That is, nothing can stop him faking photos of himself pretending to do workings. We’re much impressed, Princess.

“Ok, sir, first in the brown room in shirtsleeves, then in the white room in a jacket. Thaaaat’s it; nicely done, sir.”

Early Sunday morning, the word “staged” was trending on Twitter.

They can’t even lie to us competently.

It now appears that Trump knew he was infected Wednesday, so he knew he was exposing people who got near him, and he went right ahead and did exactly that. What a peach of a guy he is.

White House officials and doctors stoked new questions Saturday about how sick President Trump has been with COVID-19 and when he became ill, as the president’s medical team suggested Trump had been sick for a day and a half before he announced his infection early Friday morning.

The new timeline, if accurate, would mean Trump held a rally and fundraiser in Minnesota on Wednesday and an intimate fundraiser in New Jersey on Thursday while knowing he was sick, potentially exposing supporters, employees and others to the coronavirus.

He’s addicted to doing rallies and fundraisers and similar ego-parading events. A little thing like potential illness and death and wider contagion isn’t going to make him cancel.

Conley and his team tried to give an upbeat assessment of Trump’s current condition, with one physician saying that Trump told his doctors Saturday morning, “I feel like I could walk out of here today.”

I’m getting increasingly irritated by this particular line of bullshit. COVID-19 progresses; it’s not clear how bad a case is until 10 days or so in. Conley and his team obviously know that, but they’re obediently trying to manipulate us.

“The team and I are extremely happy with the progress the president has made,” Conley said.

Oh put a sock in it.

As Trump’s allies rallied to project a sense of calm, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tweeted that he’d had a “great call” with him, discussing topics including the Supreme Court vacancy and the economy. “He sounds well and says he’s feeling good,” McConnell wrote.

Blah blah blah. Doesn’t matter. It’s like the French in May 1940 saying everything’s fine…up until the moment the planes appeared.

The list of top Republicans who’ve been infected is fueling a sense of panic in Washington as the virus creates the type of outbreak in and around the president that has already enveloped other parts of the country.

Gee. If only someone had warned them. If only someone had told them, over and over, what precautions to take to avoid infecting others and being infected.

Though the District of Columbia had only a handful of new cases last week, the White House itself has become the city’s biggest vector.

All because they deliberately flouted the pandemic-avoidance instructions.

Another one of these.

Telling feminists we can’t have a sex-based women’s rights movement.

You couldn’t make it up.

Trump is doing very well, unless he’s doing very badly. It’s one of those. Maybe.

Today, when we saw the doctors line up outside Walter Reed in their white lab coats, we thought we might finally get clarity. The picture painted by the White House physician, Navy Commander Dr. Sean Conley, was rosy: Trump was in good spirits — so good, apparently, he had been fever-free for 24 hours, and felt he could have walked out of Walter Reed today.

But that wouldn’t mean anything even if it were true, which it probably isn’t. People mostly don’t feel terrible at the beginning.

Anyway, they changed their story.

The White House reporter on pool duty — traveling with the president and delivering official dispatches to reporters at numerous outlets — sent this dispatch, quoting “a source familiar with the president’s health”:

The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.

What is all this gobbledygook? Of course they’re not on a clear path to a full recovery, because this virus doesn’t work like that. This isn’t medical talk, it’s PR talk.

Anyway, the core point is that the White House is bullshitting us. Gee, you don’t say.

Yeah yeah yeah, Trump is healthy as a moose, he could break a tree in half right now if they’d let him.

President Donald Trump phoned Rudy Giuliani from his hospital bed Saturday afternoon to declare he feels so healthy, “I could get out of here right now.”

The former Big Apple mayor said his friend of 30 years sounded hale and hearty during the 2:30 p.m. conversation. “If you can judge by the way he speaks, he sounded like vintage Donald Trump,” Giuliani said.

Covid takes days to get bad. How perky Trump feels now is meaningless.

He gave Giuliani a “statement.”

“I am the president of the United States. I can’t lock myself in a room. … I had to confront [the virus] so the American people stopped being afraid of it so we could deal with it responsibly.

No, he did not have to “confront the virus” i.e. ignore it and refuse to distance and wear a mask and cancel rallies. That is not what he had to do. Also the making us less afraid thing? His actions didn’t do that.

“I’m going to beat this.

“Then I will be able to show people we can deal with this disease responsibly, but we shouldn’t be afraid of it.

“If I had handled it any other way, I would have created more panic, more fear in the American people.

“We are making great progress on dealing with this disease and making better progress with the economy than anyone had the right to expect.”

No, no, no, and no.

People who have to work for and near Trump because of their long-term careers are pissed off.

Mask-wearing had become rare among Trump’s staff and the Secret Service agents and military service crew aboard Air Force One — even after national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien tested positive in July.

On the campaign trail, Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric have spoken to packed audiences in indoor venues. And the Trump campaign violated state regulations limiting the size of gatherings in Nevada, earning a public rebuke from the governor after the president addressed thousands at an indoor event there last month.

…

While the nation suffered through an unprecedented and fear-filled lockdown, there was a bubble at the top, where Trump’s actions seemed to flout the laws of disease, and to embolden — or coerce —those around him to try it, too.

In other words military staff and Secret Service agents couldn’t wear masks around him.

Now, dozens of people — donors, aides, Secret Service agents — who had been close to Trump before his diagnosis wondered if they, too, might be infected. A whole world, with Trump at its center, suddenly faced the threat that the president had encouraged them to deny or understate.

Secret Service agents expressed their anger and frustration to colleagues and friends Friday, saying that the president’s actions have repeatedly put them at risk. “He’s never cared about us,” one agent told a confidant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal reaction.

Former Secret Service agents said it was unheard of for agents to openly complain about their president but that some currently in the ranks had become convinced during the pandemic that Trump was willing to put his protectors in harm’s way.

Agents who work in field offices around the country complained that since late August, they are no longer being tested when they return home from working at a rally for the president.

They’re not people, they’re part of Trump’s equipment.

“It’s not just Trump. It’s the entire senior team around the White House participating in this fiction that, ‘We can ignore it,’ ” said Simon Rosenberg, founder of the liberal think tank NDN. “They’re not in a bubble if they’re around other people and not wearing masks. The whole reliance [just] on testing was insane.”

And “for security reasons,” the Secret Service won’t tell us how many agents have been infected.

What Trump was busy with in the last hours before the news broke:

What ridiculous order?

Politico adds:

President Donald Trump vowed Thursday to reverse a move by the elite Navy SEALs to make its ethos gender neutral — marking the latest incursion by the commander in chief into the service’s operations.

And his latest attack on ideas of equality and fairness and opportunity.

American Military News first reported on Monday that the Navy SEALs and the Navy Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen had changed their ethos and creed statements to remove words such as “man” and “brotherhood.”

A Navy spokesperson told the outlet that the ethos and creed were written before all combat posts were opened to women.

The White House declined to comment.

Ash Carter, who was defense secretary under former President Barack Obama, in 2015 opened all combat specialties to women. However, no women have yet qualified to become a Navy SEAL.

They could always recruit a trans woman…

Melania Trump married the right guy for her.

A former friend made some tapes public.

“They say I’m complicit,” Melania Trump says of critics of her husband. “I’m the same like him, I support him. I don’t say enough, I don’t do enough where I am.

“I’m working … my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a fuck about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?”

Media figures were quick to remark on the irony of the first lady questioning her role in decorating the White House for the festive season, given her husband’s eager promotion of the so-called “war on Christmas”, a rightwing saw much pushed on Fox News which says liberals want to take the joys of the holidays away.

I’m sure he’s always been entirely sincere about that.

“OK,” the first lady says, “and then I do it and I say that I’m working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, ‘Oh, what about the children that they were separated?’ Give me a fucking break. Where they were saying anything when Obama did that?”

Very true! Plus where was he born? Where is his birth certificate? How do we know he wasn’t born on Neptune?

On the tapes, the first lady also doubts claims migrants are held in poor conditions, saying: “The kids, they say, ‘Wow I will have my own bed? I will sleep on the bed? I will have a cabinet for my clothes?’ It’s so sad to hear it but they didn’t have that in their own countries, they sleep on the floor.

“They are taken care of nicely there. But you know, yeah, they are not with parents, it’s sad. But when they come here alone or with coyotes [human traffickers] or illegally, you know, you need to do something.”

She also says migrant children are coached by their parents to say they are in danger, because “they could easily stay in Mexico but they don’t want to stay in Mexico because Mexico doesn’t take care of them the same as America does”.

Erm…does Melania Trump remember that she is herself an immigrant? One who got a special visa that she wasn’t reeeeeeeally entitled to?

Melania Trump obtained US citizenship on a visa reserved for immigrants with “extraordinary ability” and “sustained national and international acclaim”, according to a report in the Washington Post.

Not seeing the extraordinary ability, I have to say.

Nicknamed the “Einstein Visa”, the EB-1 is in theory reserved for people who are highly acclaimed in their field – the government cites Pulitzer, Oscar, and Olympic winners as examples – as well as respected academic researchers and multinational executives.

Mrs Trump began applying for the visa in 2000, when she was Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model working in New York and dating Donald Trump. She was approved in 2001, one of just five people from Slovenia to win the coveted visa that year, according to the Post.

And now she’s shitting on other immigrants from a great height. What a peach.

Oh what have we here.

He didn’t defend me. He refrained from joining the other bloggers in trashing me, for a time, but he sure as hell didn’t defend me. He privately begged me to stay, while doing nothing to defend me in public.

Then, in the end, he broke down and did a post saying I needed to “own” my mistakes.

Also, I wasn’t dismissed. I left. That “her dismissal” is a lie. He may have forgotten by now, but the fact is I left.

These people.

It’s not “an abundance of caution” (let alone “and abundance”), it’s what you’re required to do if you’ve been exposed. And it’s not “a few more days,” it’s a total of 14. This isn’t something you navigate by the seat of your pants, it’s a medical issue on which you do what the medical professionals tell you is needed. This casual amateurism is why this twerp’s balloon-head daddy now has the virus.

Twitter claims to have a rule against wishing death on people. Cue hollow laughter.

Twitter has said that tweets wishing for Donald Trump’s death in the wake of the president’s diagnosis with Covid-19 violate its policies and could result in suspension.

But what about all those tweets wishing for JK Rowling’s death?

“Tweets that wish or hope for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against anyone are not allowed and will need to be removed,” the company said in a tweet. A spokesman told the Guardian this policy has been in place since April and applies to all users, not just Trump.

That last sentence is confused: they mean the rule applies to all targets, not just Trump. It’s a rule for all users, applied to all targets. Except of course that it isn’t.

The announcement came as a surprise to many Twitter users, especially people in marginalized communities who say they frequently experience abuse on the platform. Evan Greer said that as a trans woman and the primary spokesperson for the digital rights organization Fight For the Future, she receives death threats on a “weekly, sometimes daily basis”.

Thanks Guardian. Anything about actual women? Anything at all? (Spoiler: no.)

Many people on Twitter described the policy as hypocritical, and pointed out that some users regularly receive death threats with little response from Twitter.

Women, especially.

That party last Saturday for the religious fanatic nominated to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s place appears to have been a super-spreader event.

A crowded Rose Garden ceremony last Saturday at which Donald Trump announced Amy Coney Barrett as his supreme court nominee has come under scrutiny after at least seven figures in attendance tested positive for coronavirus, including the president himself.

On Friday, the president’s former counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, announced she had tested positive and had “mild” symptoms. Two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Mike Lee, also announced they have also tested positive.

Both senators say they will quarantine for ten days…which is interesting because it should be for fourteen days, and the confirmation hearings begin…just as they stop quarantining.

Jenni Murray on why she decided to walk away from Woman’s Hour and the BBC:

I was not leaving, contrary to popular rumour, as a result of ageism on the part of the BBC. I made the decision a year ago when it became clear to me that it was time to move on and be free of the leash which, in recent years, had caused me to be what I can only describe as ‘cancelled’.

First came the furore concerning an article I had written in which I acknowledged that I was entering the most controversial and, at times, vicious, vulgar and threatening debate of our day.

I made clear that I was not transphobic or anti-trans. Indeed, I emphasised my belief that everyone — whether transgender or those of us who hold to the sex assigned to us at birth — should be treated with respect and protected from the bullying and violence that so many like me have suffered.

I merely asked the trans activists to acknowledge the difference between sex and gender, a trans woman and a woman, respect our right to safe single-sex spaces and abandon the nonsensical idea that we should be known as ‘cis women’.

Merely. Merely, she says. Women have been fed to the lions for less.

We are women. No need for further definition. I begged trans activists to understand feminism and the struggle we had experienced in fighting for our right to be viewed as equals to men.

I reminded them that feminism had fought against sexual stereotyping, and that it was ridiculous to assume a girl who liked cars and trousers really wanted to be a boy, or a boy who loved dolls was ‘born in the wrong body’ and needed to be a girl.

Of course, I was branded a TERF — a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist — on social media and threatened with all kinds of violence. But what shocked me most was the BBC’s response.

I was roundly ticked off publicly and informed that I would not be allowed to chair any discussions on the trans question or the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. I had lots of emails and tweets asking me why I had not been involved in this debate, as it was so important to Woman’s Hour listeners. You have the answer.

This is despite the fact that her show is Woman’s Hour. Women must echo the party line on trans women or be silenced; there is no other path.

It’s an interesting word, impartiality. For years, until recently, I and other broadcast journalists have written articles and books. In my case they were often controversial ones on marriage, abortion, pornography or bringing up boys, and I suffered no comeback from the BBC. At one point I was actually encouraged by a channel controller to write a regular column as a way of widening awareness of Woman’s Hour and Radio 4.

Impartiality was perceived as what a presenter demonstrated in the studio. It was not assumed that the radio or television audience expected the men and women who entered their homes on a daily basis to be dull ciphers with no opinions or personalities.

But that was before The Age of Trans Everything.

This is blood-chilling.

A teenager commits suicide (if this implausible story is even true) and Councillor Penny Zenny (who is a trans woman) asks the teenager’s mother “Was it JK Rowling?” Objection, your honor: leading the witness. In fact grabbing the witness by the neck and trying to force words out of her mouth.

Penny Zenny is easy to find on Facebook. PZ (oh there’s a funny coincidence) now has a self-pitying post (also public) about the angry reaction PZ got from that vile accusation.

I expressed my disappointment at the suicide of a youth as a direct result of the things J K Rowling has been saying and I get a whole bunch of people attacking me, not knowing my history, or the fact I have been a Samaritan, etc etc. Seems people get off of hate and ignorance.

Except the claim that the suicide was “a direct result of the things J K Rowling has been saying” came from Penny Zenny. He hasn’t offered any other reason to believe it’s true. What a horrific thing to do.

He seems to have taken down the first post. Good move, but shit move to post it in the first place.

October 2 2016:

Trump made a bye-bye video to let us know how delusional he still is.

I haven’t watched it yet. I have to pace myself on these things, or I lose the will to live.

Trump has tweeted out a video of him explaining that he’s headed to Walter Reed hospital, but reassuring Americans that he’s doing “very well.”

“We’re going to make sure that things work out,” Trump said. He added that the first lady is also “doing very well.”

He doesn’t have that power. He can’t “make sure that things work out.” The virus decides.

Also, just as Obama sent best wishes, the campaign released a disgusting dishonest attack on…Obama.