It’s Rudy’s turn.

President Donald Trump sought Friday to distance himself from attorney Rudy Giuliani, even casting doubts about whether the former New York mayor is still his lawyer.

Asked whether Giuliani remained his personal attorney, Trump said: “I don’t know.”

“I haven’t spoken to Rudy,” Trump told reporters as he was leaving the White House for a political rally in Louisiana. “I spoke to him yesterday, briefly. He’s a very good attorney and he has been my attorney, yeah sure.”

By the end of the day it will be “Rudy who?”

Trump’s remarks followed the arrest late Wednesday of two of Giuliani’s associates, Ukranian-born business partners Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, at Dulles International Airport. The two were arrested by FBI agents and charged with in connection with alleged schemes to funnel foreign money to U.S. political campaigns.

Prosecutors say Parnas and  Fruman helped Giuliani meet a Ukrainian prosecutor in the effort to gather dirt on Biden and his son Hunter, who once had business interests in Ukraine. Federal officials said Parnas and Fruman were arrested as they prepared to board an international flight with one-way tickets.

Trump said he doesn’t know them, doesn’t know them at all.

Oh good, another one. TV sports director tweets:

Today June Eastwood won the Griz home cross country meet and HBO Sports had a crew there filming

How about that. June is the great big one in the middle then?

Of course.

On Saturday, August 31, Juniper Eastwood will become the first transgender athlete to compete in DI cross country when she runs for the University of Montana in the women’s division at the Clash of the Inland Northwest meet.

Assigned male at birth, Eastwood, now a 22-year-old senior, says she has identified as female since middle school and made the decision to transition during her third year competing on the men’s track team at Montana.

Because that way guess what, he’ll win everything. Of course that means no woman will win anything, but oh well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

It will be her first race for the Grizzlies since following the NCAA’s policy on transgender student-athlete participation, which requires transgender athletes who are transitioning from male to female to be treated with testosterone suppression medication for one year before competing on a women’s team.

Totally fair. The long legs remain, the greater lung capacity remains, the bigger muscles remain, but never you mind, it’s all totally fair.

Eastwood’s last race was 15 months ago when she placed seventh in the men’s 1500-meter final at the 2018 Big Sky Conference Championships.

This article is dated August 31. It’s a miracle! In the 41 days between then and now Eastwood has improved so much that he flat-out won!

Jack Holmes at Esquire on Trump’s new level of horror last night:

Donald Trump, American president took the stage and, among a great many other things, did this. The crowd laughed and cheered.

He may once have told you, in his way, not to believe your eyes and ears. But you can. The President of the United States did indeed just act out some sort of sexual fantasy, in front of thousands and on C-SPAN, between two characters from his extended Deep State Conspiracy Universe…

…This is the president deliberately debasing his office, going lower than ever before and bringing his supporters with him, because he knows they have ventured into the deep and dark together now and they can’t see any path back. They will follow him until he is stopped, and the farther they follow, the more they are his. There is nothing that cannot be excused away with half-baked crap about Fake News or What About Hillary. Nihilism is at the heart of things now. There are no standards or ethics to be observed, only enemies to lash out at from the darkness.

The rest of last night’s national disgrace was predictable by now. The president cooked up egregious lies about Democratic leaders in Congress. He recited the names of his greatest allies on State TV and talked about how great their ratings are. He proudly said, “There was no blackmail,” on his call with the leader of Ukraine. Mr. President: Thank you. He accused his enemies of that which he is guilty. He joked about serving more than his constitutionally mandated two terms. He exhibited clear signs of cognitive decline. He said Joe Biden, the former Vice President of the United States, only got the job “because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass.” And what exactly was Proper Evangelical Good Boy Mike Pence doing while the president simulated orgasms on-stage last night? After all, he and Mother were standing there in the arena.

And then he incited racist hatred of Ilhan Omar and of Somalians. The US president did, out in the open, in a large public arena.

The president knows what he’s doing. He wants to make it not just unpleasant but physically dangerous to oppose him. He wants his enemies to be afraid to participate in our politics. It is the language of force. He also wanted to make clear that Omar’s Otherness was a proxy for the community she represents.

He’s ruining the country, and climate change will finish it off long before the damage he’s doing can be undone. We’re on a steepening slope to nightmare.

A subhead at the Telegraph:

Author David Thomas still lives as a man, but has begun the male-to-female gender transition that will eventually result in becoming a woman. Each week he chronicles his progress. This week, he talks about his attempts to lose weight

Have we all regressed to childhood?

There’s no such thing as doing or beginning or practicing the X “that will eventually result in becoming a woman” if you’re a man. A man beginning a “gender transition” can do all sorts of things to imitate women, perform being a woman, act the part of a woman, and the like, but there is no becoming a woman, not even eventually.

Also in Trump loses:

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that President Donald Trump’s accounting firm must turn over financial records requested by a House committee, a legal blow to the administration’s efforts to block congressional investigations of his finances.

It’s almost as if we have more need to see the financial records of a corrupt lying crook rather than less.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee sent a subpoena to Mazars USA, in April asking for documents related to Trump’s accounts going back to January 2009. His lawyers sued to block the subpoena, arguing that Congress had no legitimate legislative purpose for getting the materials.

But Congress also has an oversight role. Legislation is not their only job.

House Democrats said they needed the documents to investigate whether the president accurately filled out the required financial disclosure forms. A former top Trump aide, Michael Cohen, told Congress that Trump “inflated his assets when it served his purposes” and deflated his assets in others.

Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said Cohen’s testimony and other documents “raise grave questions about whether the President has been accurate in his financial reporting.”

Not that anyone anywhere actually thinks he has been accurate in his financial reporting.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Decrease is a symptom of the thing decreased.

Did you see today’s article in the New Yorker by Masha Gessen about trans rights and the Supreme Court?

I greatly admire her writing about Russian politics and gay rights, but I think she’s very wrong about bathrooms and trans rights.

I became a journalist at a time when one was not supposed to cover issues that concerned one personally. The (very few) black reporters working in the mainstream media were not assigned to write about the civil-rights movement. Women were not assigned to stories on feminism. The handful of openly gay reporters were not allowed to write about gay-and-lesbian rights or the aids epidemic. The underlying logic of this approach was that reasonable people could disagree on issues that people with a stake in the outcome would be unable to cover in a fair and balanced manner.

And yet she’s doing exactly that — not covering this issue in a fair and balanced manner.

She identifies as non-binary (like so many butch lesbians do these days), so she sees the whole debate in terms of her ability to feel comfortable using a men’s washroom despite her having been “assigned” (ugh) female at birth.

For all her defense of trans people’s right to use the washroom of their choice, she didn’t even try to define who exactly counts as a genuine trans person, how gender non-conforming a man has to be in order to be permitted to use a women’s washroom, or what mechanism we could use in practice and in law to distinguish men from transwomen, since trans is not the same as gender-non-conforming: trans is just a feeling and not something you can see, and many men who claim the label aren’t all that gender non-conforming at all.

Masha Gessen may look and dress in a way that’s perceived as more male than female, and Laverne Cox may look for all intents and purposes like a biological female, but following right behind her through the door to the women’s loo are six hulking middle-aged men with an erotic fetish for penetrating into women’s private spaces.

“Attorney General” Bill Barr met with Rupert Murdoch last night; nobody knows what they talked about.

I’m sure it’s all very innocent. I’m sure Barr in no way tried to pressure Murdoch to make Fox even more slavishly adoring of Trump. I’m sure it’s entirely normal for an Attorney General to visit the boss of a notoriously political tv network, just to lift a few beers and shoot the shit.

Also, the Guardian tells us:

At least four national security officials raised concerns over the Trump administrations’ efforts to pressure Ukraine with a White House lawyer, the Washington Post reports:

The nature and timing of the previously undisclosed discussions with National Security Council legal adviser John Eisenberg indicate that officials were delivering warnings through official White House channels earlier than previously understood — including before the call that precipitated a whistleblower complaint and the impeachment inquiry of the president.

At the time, the officials were unnerved by the removal in May of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine; subsequent efforts by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to promote Ukraine-related conspiracies; as well as signals in meetings at the White House that Trump wanted the new government in Kiev to deliver material that might be politically damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

So, this is what Trump wanted? He’s happy? All going according to plan?

Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes in northern Syria, as Turkish forces step up their cross-border offensive on Kurdish-held areas.

Turkish troops have encircled the border towns of Ras al-Ain and Tal Abyad and aid agencies fear the exodus could reach hundreds of thousands.

International clamour has increased for Turkey to halt the attack.

Turkey has defended its bid to create a “safe zone” free of Kurdish militias which could also house Syrian refugees.

Aw yeah, everybody has a right to create a “safe zone” in other people’s towns. Canada can create a “safe zone” by attacking Detroit and Buffalo because they are just plain too damn close to Canada for comfort. Trump would be fine with that, right?

The International Rescue Committee aid organisation said that 64,000 people had already reportedly fled their homes. The UK-based monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, gave a similar figure.

The IRC’s Misty Buswell said: “If the offensive continues it’s possible a total of 300,000 people could be displaced to already overstretched camps and towns still recovering from the fight against IS.”

Another group of 14 humanitarian organisations, including the Mercy Corps, warned the figure could be 450,000.

But Trump told Erdoğan to go ahead, and who are we to argue?

How to create a market:

Market creation. First they say that gender dysphoria isn’t a mental health condition and then they say that mental health conditions and neuro-diversity are signs of being transgender. Then they teach gender ideology in schools and target ads to children on Youtube.

So gender dysphoria “may present” as depression, anxiety, doing badly in school, family quarrels, frustration, anger, not dating, feeling guilty or lonely or like a loser, sadness, anhedonia, diagnosis of borderline personality disorder or autism among other items, and feelings of decreased gender dysphoria.

So, basically, everything.