Multiple whistleblowers now.

The attorneys representing the whistleblower who filed a complaint about President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine said they are representing “multiple whistleblowers” in connection to the case, including one with “first hand knowledge” of events.

“I can confirm that my firm and my team represent multiple whistleblowers in connection to the underlying August 12, 2019, disclosure to the Intelligence Community Inspector General,” attorney Andrew Bakaj tweeted Sunday. “No further comment at this time.”

Mark Zaid, another member of the first whistleblower’s legal team, also said the team is representing a second official with first-hand knowledge of events, as first reported by ABC News. The original whistleblower had not heard or seen a transcript of the phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the center of the August 12 complaint.

And so Republicans have been squawking “secondhand!” for days.

“I can confirm this report of a second #whistleblower being represented by our legal team,” Zaid tweeted. “They also made a protected disclosure under the law and cannot be retaliated against. This WBer has first hand knowledge.”

“Multiple” is more than two, I think, so there are two plus ???

Anyway, Trump’s skin is getting crisper by the minute.

Guest post by Dave Ricks.
In the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA), the word “sex” was clearly intended to remedy a history of discrimination based on “sex” meaning female (i.e. a dictionary definition, biologically, XX chromosomes, etc.).

But recent legal actions conflate “sex” with “gender identity”.  For example, the way the Democrats wrote the Equality Act (EA) as changes to the CRA (PDF here), they replace the word “sex” with the phrase “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)“.  A civil rights lawyer wrote three blog posts here that show how this conflation will undo 50 years of case law, spawn 50 years of new cases to interpret the conflation, and be a disaster for the sex-based rights of females who were intended to benefit from the CRA originally.

Another example is the Harris Funeral Homes case at the Supreme Court (Tuesday, Oct 8).  Aimee Stephens worked at a funeral home and came out to their employer as a transwoman.  Stephens lost their job for wearing a dress, which is against the dress code of the employer who considers Stephens to be a man.  If this was simply a dress code problem, I would not be alarmed, but this case uses CRA Title VII (about employment) to argue that — under the protected category of “sex” — an employer must accept the employee’s “gender identity”.

The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) filed an amicus brief with the court (PDF here) that explains legal problems with this.  Natasha Chart of WoLF talks about it for about 30 minutes here.  I could write more, but she speaks for herself, so I’ll stop here.

WoLF will rally at the court Tuesday, and I should go to support them.  WoLF will be vastly outnumbered by Trans Rights Advocates (TRAs) who think only evil people could disagree with them.  That could get interesting.

Pliny the in Between:

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Not so much an annoyance as a burning social injustice.

That sounds ridiculous. I’ve not heard of that before.

I know it’s not the same thing, but sanitary napkin disposal boxes became an issue at the concert venue I used to manage. Our toilets went “all-gender” a few years ago due to demands from our young hyper-woke employees. (This consisted of replacing the “Men’s/Women’s” signs with ones that read “Washroom with Urinals/Washroom with Stalls”.) The employees wanted us to install a pad/tampon disposal box in the former men’s washroom (like we have in every stall in the former women’s), since it was expected that women would start using the men’s stall. Naturally, no one got around to installing it, because naturally, women never want to use the washroom that consists of a wall of urinals and one not-very-private stall next to them. In practice, the men’s room is still the men’s room, and the women’s room is a spillover extra men’s room when the venue gets busy. Many men use the former women’s room even when it’s not busy — in some kind of gesture of progressiveness, or just to be jerks, I don’t know. In the end, what it means is women now have to wait twice as long to use the washroom, because of men. Great job, woke kids!

My board of directors asked me if I had been receiving any complaints from men since the bathrooms went all-gender. I told them there were none from men, but there had been tons from women right from the start: complaints about increased wait times, complaints about mess on the seats, complaints about discomfort, complaints from feminists. The board seemed completely uninterested in the complaints from women. (Which was extra surprising because the most active board members were women.)

It appears that women are getting too educated.

The gender imbalance in educational attainment is getting larger every year. That may spell good news, ultimately, for income and employment equality—but it presages increasingly problematic social conditions for generations of men and women.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, more than 57% of the class of 2018 who graduated with bachelor’s degrees were female. The gap for master’s degrees was even wider: 59% to 41%.

In terms of economic justice this is good news, Gerard Baker admits, but what about The Mate Quest?

Most studies of human heterosexual attraction suggest both that intellectual capacity and achievement is an important attractor and that people tend to gravitate toward a partner with roughly the same level of attainment.

But every year, the pool of eligible male graduates is getting smaller relative to the number of women.

What about when it was the other way around?

Well it’s like this. When it was the other way around, it was fine, because women aren’t supposed to be clever or educated.

Rosa Silverman on why toilets are a feminist issue:

Discussing “the tyranny of the toilet queue” on Emma Barnett’s BBC Radio 5 Live show this week, the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado Perez made a spirited and well-founded argument for why toilets are a feminist issue; not so much an annoyance as a burning social injustice.

“Everyone knows that women have to queue for the toilet and men tend to just walk in and out, and that’s because we have traditionally given equal floor space for men and women for their toilets,” she told listeners.

It might seem fair on the face of it but, she contended, it isn’t: “For a start, male toilets tend to have urinals in them, which take up less space and immediately mean men have more provision than women with equal floor space. On top of that there are all sorts of reasons why women both will need to go more often and also may take longer when they’re in there.”

As Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, went on to explain, women need to go more often when they’re pregnant; women are eight times more likely to suffer urinary tract infections, which means they will be going more often; they are more likely to be accompanied by young children (a time-consuming process indeed); and on any given day, a proportion of women will be menstruating. (Meanwhile, on any given day, some men can be found effortlessly relieving themselves behind trees or, in extremis, in the street.) So how can it be fair that the same amount of floor space be devoted to men and women’s facilities?

There’s also the anatomy aspect, which was perhaps awkward to cite on live radio, but it does add to the time women take.

Toilets are a feminist issue. As a blog post on the website of the charity WaterAid warned in 2017, “There are many times in a woman’s life when she particularly needs a safe, private toilet. When she doesn’t have one, the consequences are serious. Having a loo can mean the difference between living in dignity or shame, health or illness, between getting an education, or dropping out of school.”

Toilets are a feminist issue for the same reason period poverty is a feminist issue: because lack of provision holds girls and women back and affects both their health and their prospects.

Toilets are a feminist issue in this country too because we have had to fight for them. In Victorian Britain, the public sphere was for men, while the home was the woman’s domain. Since most public conveniences were for use by men only, women had to plan trips out of the house carefully. The Ladies Sanitary Association campaigned for women’s toilets from the 1850s onwards, and a few were duly installed.

When women entered the workforce in large numbers after the First World War, toilets were again a big issue, as workplaces had been designed for men, and therefore lacked women’s facilities. Some employers were reluctant to change this, fearful women were stealing men’s jobs.

I’ve posted some news stories about girls or women who were raped and/or murdered because of the lack of a safe, private toilet.

Kate Aronoff says what I’ve been saying:

The standard lines from Democrats about Hunter Biden and his business dealings in China and Ukraine have been consistent: Donald Trump has abused the office of the president by asking foreign leaders to investigate Biden’s son, and there is absolutely no proof that either Joe or Hunter Biden have done anything to break the law. Any questionable dealings by Biden’s son also pale in comparison to ethical breaches on the part of Ivanka, Eric or Donald Trump Jr, who have routinely blurred the lines between the extended Trump Organization – the family’s business empire –and their presence in the White House.

This is all true, and arguably these are the right lines vis-a-vis the long overdue impeachment proceedings. What’s harder to shake is the fact that Hunter Biden’s career is undeniably shady in the way that only the son of a longtime Washington insider could muster, failing upwards into positions of influence and power on the merits of his last name.

And that matters. Saying that Ivanka and Don Junior are worse is hardly an all clear. Hunter Biden failed upwards into a 50 grand a month seat on the board of a Ukrainian company because he’s Joe Biden’s son. We don’t need that. The fact that he was Obama’s VP is nowhere near reason enough to cling to him despite the shady doings.

I have a column in the current Free Inquiry and it’s one of the non-paywalled items this time.

It’s about Trump’s patriotism theater. It was fun to write.

Even if we can figure out exactly what we’re being ordered to love, it’s not actually the case that we’re legally obliged to do so. We’re not required to feel amorous toward “it” as a condition of being allowed to go on living here as citizens. We’re not made to undergo regular “love it” inspections to gauge whether our affection levels are above the red line. We don’t have to send monthly reports on our patriopassion on pain of expulsion. If we were born here, we get to live here, no questions asked. If we become citizens, same deal: we get to live here.

Granted there have been some feints toward the idea in the past. The House Un-American Activities Committee was a kind of “Do you really love us?” exercise, but even then, the outcome was not expulsion from the country. The Civil War was a serious attempt at divorce, and from that we got the anxieties about allegiance that led to the wretched custom of making children swear a solemn oath every school day as if we were hoping to create a robot army. But even then, allegiance is not the same as love.

It is true that adults who immigrate here do have to undergo a ceremony in which they renounce previous loyalty and shift it to this one. But that’s once; when it’s done it’s done. The government doesn’t phone the new citizens every day to ask, “Do you still love me? Do you really love me? What do you love about me most? Why were you making eyes at that other country yesterday?”

Dulce et decorum est, yeah?

1950 here we come.

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear June Medical Services v. Gee, a challenge to Louisiana’s stringent abortion restrictions. There is very little doubt that the conservative majority will use this case to overrule 2016’s Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, allowing states to regulate abortion clinics out of existence. In the process, the Republican-appointed justices will set the stage for the formal reversal of Roe v. Wade. The court’s decision to hear June Medical Services came with the alarming announcement that it will also consider whether to strip doctors of their ability to contest abortion laws in court. These aggressive moves augur an impending demise of the constitutional right to abortion access.

Oh well, it’s only women.

Also…Maddow had a good deal of innocent fun night before last with a large envelope that sported a weirdly baroque address (Secretary Pompeo attn Ruth – the “attn Ruth” was pretty hilarious too). Now I understand, via Josh Rogin:

Rudy admits to CNN he passed the packet of Ukraine conspiracy theories and attacks on a U.S. ambassador to Pompeo. “They (the State Department) told me they would investigate it.”

By the way, Rudy is admitting to manufacturing White House logos and sticking them on non-White House documents and pushing the real government to act on them.

Walter Shaub:

Josh, are you inferring that from his statement that he’s responsible for the packet, or is he literally saying he sat down and drew “White House” in the upper left?

Rogin:

He’s admitted to passing the packet to Pompeo. I don’t know who exactly worked the photoshop, but the presidents lawyer gave it the Secretary of State and this was not an official WH document.

Shaub:

Thanks! I asked because it doesn’t look Photoshopped to me, it looks hand drawn (which is insane). It’ll be interesting to see if he specifically says he created the fake logo. Compare the Pompeo package to an actual White House envelope.

Giuliani sent a package of conspiracy theories about the ambassador to Ukraine, to the Secretary of State, in a pink envelope with Gorgeous Scrolly Writing and a fake THE WHITE HOUSE in the corner.

In our wildest dreams we couldn’t…

This is disgustingly flippant and cynical.

Marco Rubio blows off Trump’s “Chye-nah should investigate Biden” as trolling:

This morning in the Florida Keys, @marcorubio was asked about the President calling on China to investigate @JoeBiden – see his answer↓

His answer:

I don’t know if that’s a real request or him just needling the press knowing that you guys were going to get outraged by it. He’s pretty good at getting everybody fired up, and he’s been doing that for awhile, and the media responded right on task.

A reporter repeated the question.

I don’t think that’s a real request. I think he did it to gig you guys. I think he did it to provoke you to ask me and others and get outraged by it. Like I said, he plays it like a violin and everybody falls right into it. That’s not a real request.

It’s the other way around. He pretends to be just needling, just gigging, just provoking, but it’s for real. There’s no way Marco Rubio doesn’t know that.

Can we drain that swamp?