Trump is livid, LIVID, about all these crazy political Supreme Court justices. How can they be so political?! It’s an outrage!

There is already a conservative (or right-wing) majority on the court. Roberts voted with the liberals on the DACA ruling, and Trump clearly thinks that’s an outrage. It’s hilarious that he complains about “politically charged decisions” though (or that Scavino translates whatever scream of rage he uttered into that phrase), given how adamantly political his choices and the confirmation process have been.

Naturally several million people have tweeted the obvious reply.

He paused for an hour to breathe and then returned to the fray.

He’s already got his conservative majority.

Is he planning to kill one of the current justices?

Trump made Juneteenth very famous.

The Times explains the car crash:

Reviewing a list of potential locations over the past few weeks, [Brad] Parscale quickly settled on Tulsa, Okla., people familiar with the planning said in interviews, mostly because it seemed easy. A deep red state President Trump carried by 36 percentage points four years ago, Oklahoma wasn’t in play for the November election. But it was the furthest along of any state in the country in terms of reopening, and it had seen fewer than 400 Covid-19 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.

A city with a supportive Republican mayor, where the coronavirus was no longer having a deep impact on daily life, seemed like the most effortless way to pack an arena and deliver Mr. Trump the adulatory validation he craved.

And to get those Covid-19 numbers way up!

But to the surprise of no one except possibly Brad Parscale, it has all gone wrong.

Mr. Trump and his aides failed to grasp the significance of holding a rally on Juneteenth, a holiday celebrated annually on June 19 that honors the end of slavery in the United States. Nor did they appear to realize that Tulsa was the site of one of the country’s bloodiest outbreaks of racist violence.

Which means they didn’t bother to do any basic research, or talk to anyone outside their bubble of corrupt hacks.

Ignoring Tulsa’s troubled history, as well as the Juneteenth holiday, has put the community on edge as the rally approaches, and refocused attention on how few African-American aides work on Mr. Trump’s campaign or in the White House.

Well, that, but more basically, Trump’s total lack of interest in the “troubled history” of black people in the US, coupled with his strong and passionate interest in overt racism. One, he doesn’t give the tiniest shit about slavery and its hideous aftermath, and two, he’s an unabashed racist who spews racist shit on a regular basis.

Other than that…

So anyway they changed the date. You’d think Trump would dig in because that’s what he does, but no, see, the thing is, it wasn’t his idea in the first place so it’s cool.

For a president whose guiding political philosophy has been to double down in the face of criticism, it was seen as a stunning reversal. But Mr. Trump was amenable to changing the date, multiple officials said, in part because it did not involve caving on something he had said or a theory he had promoted, but rather involved publicly overturning a decision made by his campaign aides.

That’s very funny, in a quiet way. “Oh he was fine with it,” multiple officials said, “because it makes someone else look bad, and you know he loves that.”

CNN has some more nibbles from Bolton’s book.

Bolton writes that in December 2018, Trump offered to help Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a Justice Department investigation into a Turkish bank with ties to Erdogan that was suspected of violating US Iran sanctions. When the Turkish leader presented Trump with a memo from the law firm representing Halkbank, Trump flipped through it and then declared he believed the bank was totally innocent of violating US sanctions related to Iran.

Well thank goodness he looked into it thoroughly before committing himself.

Trump told Erdogan he would “take care of things,” and explained that the Southern District prosecutors “were not his people, but were Obama people,” and the problem would be fixed when they were replaced by his people.

Bolton notes that “this was all nonsense” because the Justice Department prosecutors were career employees who would have taken the same path with the Halkbank probe regardless of who was president.

Well Trump doesn’t understand fine distinctions of that kind. He thinks he has Absolute Power to do Absolutely Anything that pops into his head.

Before joining Trump’s White House, Bolton says he had a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who questioned Jared Kushner’s role in developing a Middle East peace plan.

Netanyahu “was dubious about assigning the task of bringing an end to the Israel-Palestinian conflict to Kushner, whose family Netanyahu had known for many years. He was enough of a politician not to oppose the idea publicly, but like much of the world, he wondered why Kushner thought he would succeed where the likes of Kissinger had failed.”

Being such a callow empty suit and having zero relevant education or expertise or experience. Maybe these guys think being rich translates to being universally skilled?

Another twerp heaves another rock:

Harry Potter fans—yes, I’m addressing roughly the entire Millennial generation—we need to have another tough conversation with ourselves: We must end our Harry Potter fantasy now.

She goes on to detail what a passionate, indeed obsessive fan she was growing up, and then gets on with the stoning.

I’m also a ciswoman, which means my feelings are not the point right now. As significant as the franchise has been for me, if I am actually going to be the ally I fancy myself to be, that means I have to consider the damage Rowling (and potentially the entire series) has done to trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people.

She’s a woman, so her feelings don’t matter right now. Won’t somebody please think of the feelings of men for once?

Being a white ciswoman gives me a voice—like a magical power, but a shitty one, because it’s a power others are denied.

Ahhhh there it is, spotted in the wild – the core Big Lie of this whole enterprise. She frames women as domineering over men, women as the people who have privilege that men lack, women who have an illegitimate hold on power, women who oppress and dominate and exploit and exclude.

It’s my job to use that “magical power” as a force for good and say what nobody wants to say. To bring to light that if Rowling had been a Hogwarts parent and heard that Lupin was a werewolf, her Karen-self likely would have demanded he be fired for putting her little Hufflepuff in danger.

There it is again – women are Karens, so now they’re the hated oppressor class and it’s not just ok but positively virtuous to do everything you can to destroy their lives.

This just in: Trump fails in his attempt to throw the children of undocumented immigrants out of the country.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration cannot carry out its plan to shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed nearly 800,000 young people, known as “Dreamers,” to avoid deportation and remain in the U.S.

The decision is a big legal defeat for President Donald Trump on the issue of immigration, which has been a major focus of his domestic agenda.

That is, the issue of brown people messing up his shiny gleaming white country.

The decision authored mostly by Chief Justice John Roberts said the government failed to give an adequate justification for ending the federal program. The administration could try again to shut it down by offering a more detailed explanation for its action, but the White House might not want to end such a popular program in the heat of a presidential campaign.

Also probably wouldn’t have time.

An added wrinkle is that throwing DACA people out now would strain the medical system even more than it already is.

Brave and stunning Charlotte Clymer, who as Charles Clymer was notorious for being a domineering “I’m a good guy!” male feminist who liked to talk over women, has a piece in USA Today explaining to JK Rowling how unsafe and vulnerable trans women are…in all-too-typical oblivion of or indifference to the ways women are unsafe and vulnerable.

The rights and dignity of transgender people are constantly under attack, not only legally but physically, as we see with continuing violence against trans people, and culturally, as evidenced by the controversy J.K. Rowling stirred up last week.

You know who else is constantly under attack physically? Women. The statistics say so. Culturally we’re under attack from misogynists and pussy-grabbers and guys like Charlotte Clymer.

Her transphobic remarks attempted to deny the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus affirming trans people and peddled dangerous and hurtful myths about our community.

There is no such overwhelming consensus, and what consensus there is is all of about ten years old. We’re not talking about gravity here.

He then says it’s hard to believe Rowling knows any trans people, because HEY WE’RE IN DANGER. He gives examples.

I haven’t been to the gym since I came out. Most cisgender women would be completely fine with a trans woman using the showers after a workout, but do I want to risk ticking off some random transphobe? No. Do I want to risk having someone take photos of me without my consent? No.

See what I mean? What if some of those pesky “cisgender women” are not completely fine with having Charlotte, recently Charles, Clymer getting naked next to them? He doesn’t even pause to think about it that way – because of course he doesn’t. It’s not for him to take our needs into account, it’s for us to take his. New boss just like the old boss.

If I’m out in another city, either for business or pleasure, I watch how much I eat and drink. I don’t want to be in a position where I’ll need to use a public restroom and feel uncertain whether it’s safe.

Women who might feel unsafe when he comes in? Again, pffffff, who cares.

I have a membership to a women-only workspace. It’s quite trans-inclusive and make a point of being affirming. I’m still not going to use its shower facility. Too risky. Some random transphobe makes a fuss, and it becomes a whole thing. Not worth it.

He has a membership to a women-only workspace, which he feels perfectly happy to render not-women-only by his presence, and then he whines about a potential “transphobe” by which he means a woman who wants a women-only workspace to be actually for women, not women plus men who say they feel like women.

There is not a week that has gone by since I came out that I wasn’t street harassed in some way. It’s just something I don’t even talk about anymore. I expect it and move on with my day. Put my headphones in and walk, so I can avoid hearing it.

Again – has he ever spoken to a woman in his life? If so has he listened?

That’s enough. I’m too sick of this oblivious egotistical BUT MY NEEDS crap to read any more of it. But it’s why we won’t just roll over.

Matt Gaetz is such a worthless piece of crap.

Bolton’s book is lighting up the Twitternet.

This one got my attention:

He what?

David Choi at Business Insider:

President Donald Trump approved of a concentration camp for Uighur Muslims in China during a private meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to former national security adviser John Bolton’s upcoming memoir, “In The Room Where It Happened.”

In a private meeting during the 2019 G-20 meeting in Japan, Trump and Xi were only accompanied by their interpreters, according to Bolton’s book, parts of which were published in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Xi “explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang,” Bolton claimed, based on the interpreter’s account. The interpreter reportedly added that “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

Of course he did. He likes to single out Muslims for persecution and insult and banishment himself, and he likes to cozy up to people who like to do things like that. He would have loved Hitler, and I say that in all seriousness. An empty head and a complete lack of moral compass is all it takes to love Hitler.

The Chinese Communist Party has long been criticized for its construction of large concentration camps in Xinjiang, where millions of ethnic minority Uighur Muslims are believed to be detained under the guise of a counter-terrorism campaign. Inside the roughly 465 camps in Xinjiang and surrounding region, roughly 2-3 million Uighur Muslims are under surveillance and are subject to mandatory “reeducation” training. Some survivors have reported being beaten, subjected to medical experiments, and even being forced to watch gang rapes.

Exactly the right thing to do though.

Josh Dawsey at the Post has been reading Bolton’s book.

He tried the same move on China as he tried on Ukraine.

During a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi complained to Trump about China critics in the United States. But Bolton writes in a book scheduled to be released next week that “Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats.

“He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton writes. “He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”…

The episode described by Bolton in his book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” bears striking similarities to the actions that resulted in Trump’s impeachment after he sought to pressure the Ukrainian president to help dig up dirt on Democratic rival Joe Biden in exchange for military assistance.

So we can assume he’s done it to everyone, because he’s far too stupid to figure out that different heads of state have different interests, and just assumes they will all do what he asks if he bullies or pleads hard enough.

The request for electoral assistance from Xi is just one of many instances described by Bolton in which Trump seeks favors or approval from authoritarian leaders. Many of those same leaders were also happy to take advantage of the U.S. president and attempt to manipulate him, Bolton writes, often through simplistic appeals to his various obsessions.

Yeah no shit. It’s not as if he doesn’t advertise how stupid he is.

Bolton recounts numerous private conversations Trump had with other leaders that revealed the limits of his knowledge. He recalls Trump asking Kelly if the nation of Finland is part of Russia. In a meeting with then-British Prime Minister Theresa May in 2018, a British official referred to the UK as a “nuclear power,” and Trump interjects: “Oh, are you a nuclear power?” Bolton adds that he could tell the question about Britain, which has long maintained a nuclear arsenal, “was not intended as a joke.”

If only that were surprising. It’s not surprising in the least. He’s made it entirely clear that he knows nothing. This is a man who insists on referring to one of his [shudder] predecessors as “Honest Abe.”

Daniel Dale had some time so he made a list (non-exhaustive) of Trump’s lies about Obama.

Trump has long been fixated on his predecessor. Since May 1, as his presidential campaign against former Vice President Joe Biden has heated up, Trump has made at least 12 separate false claims about Obama and his record in office.

Trump added a new one Tuesday in a speech about police reform, declaring that Obama and Biden “never even tried” to fix problems in policing. That’s not even close to true.

It’s true of Trump. It’s not true of Obama.

Trump touted his own efforts to address policing problems, then said, “President Obama and Vice President Biden never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period. The reason they didn’t try is because they had no idea how to do it.”

Who has fewer ideas of any kind: Obama, or Trump? Who thinks less? Who knows less? Who reads less? Who talks to experts and critics and a wide range of people less?

Obama’s Department of Justice initiated “pattern-or-practice” investigations into troubled police departments and secured court-enforceable consent decrees or other agreements in which cities including Baltimore, Cleveland, Portland and Miami formally agreed to make changes.

Ok but besides that.

In 2014, after the unrest that followed the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Obama launched the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which in 2015 put forward dozens of recommendations for improvement. The administration provided grants to some departments that were implementing the recommendations.

Ok but…oh never mind.

Trump claimed: “I did Criminal Justice Reform, something Obama & Biden didn’t even try to do – & couldn’t do even if they did try.”

Facts First: The Obama administration did try to get a criminal justice reform bill passed; a bipartisan bill failed in the Senate during the 2016 presidential election, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided not to bring it up for a vote.

Ok but that’s Obama’s fault!

Trump said Obama did nothing about HIV/AIDS; in fact his administration spent billions on it.

That’s three; there are nine more.

Fallon Fox achieving peak woke:

It’s not as if they’re not trying to persuade Trump not to kill them.

On 16 April, the White House issued guidelines for the nation’s slow reemergence from lockdown. But the next day, rather than promote his own administration’s advice, Donald Trump tweeted demands to immediately “LIBERATE MICHIGAN”, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA”. At every step of the crisis, say public health experts, the president has undermined the government’s efforts.

Now, local officials are begging Trump to cancel his planned rally in Tulsa this weekend amid a surge of coronavirus cases in Oklahoma, one of six US states to report record numbers of infections in recent days.

No, he’s not going to do that, but he is going to shout insensitive bullshit at Ahmaud Arbery’s mother on Twitter. Will that do?

So, this should go well.

New cases of the novel coronavirus in Oklahoma’s Tulsa County have nearly doubled in recent weeks, according to the latest data from the Tulsa Health Department. The county is home to the city of Tulsa, where President Donald Trump is scheduled to hold his next rally on June 19.

What do rallies feature? Huge crowds! All mashed together so that everyone can see how huge the crowd is!

Tulsa County reported a total of 263 new cases from June 5 to 11, a jump from 149 new cases reported from May 29 to June 4, a rise of over 76 percent.

The county’s seven-day rolling average of daily cases has been on a sharp increasing trend from June 1 to 11, the Tulsa Health Department reports.

But that’s okay. No doubt it will plummet in the next three days, as a courtesy to Trump.

Trump’s upcoming rally will be his first since the start of the outbreak. Large scale political rallies were paused in March due to the threat of spreading infection among large crowds.

But now that the threat is worse…he’s doing a rally. Thanks, Mister Sir.

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said in a statement to Newsweek that his office was in the process of confirming the details regarding Trump’s next rally. “Tulsans have managed one of the first successful reopenings in the nation,” Bynum said, “so we can only guess that may be the reason President Trump selected Tulsa as a rally site.”

How is he defining “successful” exactly?

Trump told reporters on Wednesday: “They’ve done a great job with COVID, as you know, in the state of Oklahoma.”

Well, no, Jethro, we don’t know they’ve done a great job.

News from the Boogaloo:

Facebook on Tuesday removed almost 900 accounts associated with the far-right Proud Boys and American Guard, including those belonging to Proud Boys supporters who marched into a protest zone in Seattle Monday and confronted anti-racist demonstrators.

…

Facebook had previously banned the groups for promoting hate, but individual members continued to post images with weapons and urge others to attend protests that followed the Minneapolis killing of George Floyd in police custody.

Facebook is under heightened scrutiny as provocateurs use it to coordinate and recruit. It has also acted to make it harder to find groups in the so-called Boogaloo movement.

Now about those Russian accounts…

Oh, man, this is the kind of thing that makes me totally furious. Well there are lots of those, but still – this especially. Another man in pearls steals women’s history.

Transgender Woman Will Lead Gender Studies Program At Rutgers

Next up:

White Man Will Lead Critical Race Theory Program At Rutgers

Just kidding, they would never do that. Never never never. They would eat broken glass before they would do that. But women? Oh that’s completely different…because, you see, women are karens, so they have privilege over men in pearl necklaces.

Rutgers University: Catherine Fitzpatrick may be the first openly transgender woman in the U.S. to lead a women’s and gender studies program

That is, “Catherine” Fitzpatrick may be the first openly male person in the U.S. to lead a women’s and gender studies program, but we bet he won’t be the last!

An English literature professor at the university since 2014, Fitzpatrick believes she may be the first openly transgender woman in the country to lead a Women’s and Gender Studies program.

And has no qualms about it. Fitzpatrick has no qualms about taking a job that should have gone to a woman, because we have all now been instructed that trans women are more oppressed than women, and thus get to grab everything that used to belong to women, including even the subject “women” and the discipline women’s studies. Women are second best and frankly should just…well, you know, stay home and bake pies.

There are openly transgender scholars who lead other programs and departments at the university level, according to Yale professor Susan Stryker, one of the country’s foremost scholars on gender issues. But when Fitzpatrick was asked to take the helm of a program dedicated to the study of women and gender – an appointment Stryker also thinks is a first for a transgender woman – it felt like the ultimate validation of her true self.

And that, of course, is infinitely more important than the validation of the fact that women matter too, just as men matter. Sorry laydeez that’s old hat, we don’t believe that any more. Trans women matter, but you, not so much. I like cherry pie the best.

“I think I can now announce that I have accepted the position of director of Women’s Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Relatedly, we can finally answer the age-old question, ‘how do I know when my transition is over?'” she wrote in a tweet this fall.

That’s what matters – his transition. Not women, not the movement to free women from the rules and limits imposed on them from time immemorial, no, just the transition of a man to a pretend-woman.

Though she was showered with congratulatory tweets from followers, Fitzpatrick’s happy moment also drew out trolls questioning her appointment. And she knows she will be hounded by some feminist groups that reject the role of trans women in the feminist movement once her story is shared on social media.

Yes how dare women think that feminism is for women just as BLM is for black people. How dare women think they get to say men are not women however much they like to fantasize that they are. How dare they say anything at all, really.

“I think this is precisely the thing that certain feminists feel is a betrayal. The argument tends to recycle itself because there are always new transwomen coming out,” she said. “They come for people without any provocation, but if you avoid engaging them online, they get bored and go away.”

So he gets that we “feel” it’s a betrayal, but he also doesn’t care, and feels entitled to ignore us until we go away.

However, Fitzpatrick is quick to point out that while a trans lady running a Women’s and Gender Studies program is “cool,” it has not escaped her that she is another white professor in a position of power at one of the most diverse universities in the nation. She said she is committed to using her new role to represent marginalized communities – especially those in Newark.

Wow. That rubs it in even more. Taking a woman’s job is “cool” but oh oh oh he’s a white professor, oh oh oh where are some marginalized communities he can represent? Maybe some of those bitches could draw up a list for him during breaks from pie-baking?

“I don’t want to think about trans-only issues,” she said. “I want courses that talk about a much broader bases of things, courses that focus on race, disability, the struggle for sex worker’s rights and Mad Pride (mental health) movements.”

Every fucking god damn thing except the struggle for women’s rights. Because it’s become so “cool” to hand those over to men.

Look at this absolute shit.

Two people are murdered, and this shit uses them to pretend their murders are the fault of feminist women.

In other words men who want a fuck discover that the person they want to fuck doesn’t have female genitalia so they fly into a male rage…………

…………..and the real responsibility for that is not that of the men who do it but of the feminist women who say that only women are women.

Also in Trump’s speech on race-not speech on race, the loudest dog whistle ever:

Our heritage of Jim Crow laws and the blocking of Reconstruction and “vagrancy” laws that sent thousands of black men to prisons that contracted them out to…you’ll never guess…cotton plantations. And race riots and lynching. That heritage.

Or maybe that wasn’t his “speech on race” (which god knows nobody wants to hear), maybe it was his “ban on chokeholds except when the cops really want to use it” speech. It can be hard to be sure with him.

Trump has taken the podium in the Rose Garden, and he said he had just privately met with several families who lost loved ones to police brutality. “All Americans mourn by your side,” Trump said to the families, who were not present for the Rose Garden event. “Your loved ones will not have died in vain.”

What, because he’s now signed an order saying no chokeholds except when you really want to? That makes all those deaths not in vain?

And what a disgusting thing to say anyway, especially to people who aren’t there. If he really thought his order would be a consolation to them, they should have been in the front row, or on the podium; instead they weren’t present at all.

No, it’s just one of those reflexive verbal formulas that he uses so much because he doesn’t know how to think.

Trump blamed police brutality on a small number of police officers, even though criminal justice activists have argued police brutality is a reflection of systemic racism.

“They’re very tiny,” Trump said of the officers responsible for police brutality. “I use the word tiny. It’s a very small percentage. But nobody wants to get rid of them more than the really good and great police officers.”

Is it a very small percentage? I don’t think he knows that, and I strongly doubt that it’s true.

Trump has now signed the executive order on police reform, surrounded by law enforcement officials who were invited to the Rose Garden event.

The visual struck some as odd, considering the president had privately met with families who lost loved ones to police brutality moments before the event and the order comes after nationwide protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd.

Yeah not really “odd.” No that’s not the right word.

Trump has apparently given his “speech on race.” Many are confused.

I guess this is the part where he actually talked about it, sort of.

…as we strive to deliver safe [here he stops reading and ad libs] byootifull elegant [returns to reading] justice (and liberty) for all.

What the everloving fuck is elegant justice? What’s he talking about? Why does he think he needs to add interior decoration adjective to the word “justice”? And I suspect he also added that “and liberty,” because it doesn’t make sense there. I suspect “the Pledge of Allegiance” has trained him to think “libertyandjustice” is all one word.

Then he calls a bunch of law enforcement people to come up and stand next to him.

The racial justice aspect is………………………..not obvious.

For some reason Laurie Penny thought we needed to hear the formulas from her too, in case we hadn’t already heard them enough times from enough other fools and cowards.

What happened to sisterhood?

Good question. What happened to yours?

Last week, beloved children’s author J.K. Rowling became the world’s most famous transphobe.

Second sentence, and already in the ditch. Calling her a “transphobe” assumes what needs to be argued, aka poisons the well. Who says she’s a “transphobe”? On what basis do they say it? Is it true? Is it true even in the terms of people who go along with most of the dogma?

After the Harry Potter writer spent days defending transphobia on Twitter and in her blog, writing that she was “worried about the new trans activism,” millions of distraught fans and confused bystanders were left wondering what the hell was going on.

That’s more frankly just a lie. If I were Rowling I’d be considering sending in that lawyer again. Rowling did not “defend transphobia.”

But Rowling’s public spasm of self-delusion isn’t unusual.

Oh we’re the ones with the self-delusion, are we – we who don’t believe men magically become women by saying “I am a woman” – we’re delusional.That’s persuasive.

Britain is the epicenter of a strange, savage, and specific cultural backlash against trans rights. That backlash is doing real harm to people whose lives should not be up for debate.

What does that mean? If she means “whose right to live should not be up for debate” then of course they shouldn’t, but then no one is arguing that they should, so why say it? If she means “whose claims about their identity which contradicts their physical reality should not be up for debate” then that’s just absurd. It’s a useful trick, putting it ambiguously like that, because it makes people shy of disputing it.

I’d do the rest but…it’s long, and LP is not an interesting writer.