What? What’s he done now?

Let me guess – some crowd thing, that was canceled so as not to spread the virus even more, and he pitched a fit and said SPREAD THE VIRUS MORE.

Of course he did.

On Monday, after evaluating plans to hold a large annual event in the midst of an escalating pandemic, Arlington National Cemetery canceled the event planned next month, saying it could not mitigate the risk to thousands of visitors and cemetery staff.

But on Tuesday, after criticism from Republican lawmakers and public outcry, President Trump said he overrode Army officials, tweeting that he “reversed the ridiculous decision to cancel Wreaths Across America,” an annual event that draws thousands of volunteers to lay holidays wreaths on headstones throughout the cemetery.

So more people will get the virus, and more hospitals and healthcare workers will be swamped, and more people will die of the virus.

The reversal comes a day after cemetery officials announced they evaluated several options to hold the event — in consultation with public health officials and Wreaths Across America — and decided the cemetery could not safely execute the sprawling operation.

…

Republican lawmakers, including war veterans Rep. Dan Crenshaw (Tex.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), criticized Army officials when the cancellation was announced. “Our fallen deserve to be remembered,” Crenshaw said on Twitter.

But it’s entirely possible to remember them without physically going to Arlington at the height of a pandemic. The fallen are not there, they’re not sitting in the graves watching to see if people turn up or not. It’s possible, and responsible, to put off visiting the graves until later, while still remembering the dead now.

I wish someone in heavy boots would kick Trump in the head.

The full image:

I can’t begin to express how insulting to women that photo is.

Giuliani is earning the desired 2 20k per diem by lying in court:

Rudy Giuliani launched into a series of baseless claims about the election during an appearance on behalf of the Trump campaign in federal court on Tuesday, seeking to block Pennsylvania from certifying its election results.

Giuliani, who requested to appear on behalf of Trump this morning, alleged there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

That’s false; there isn’t a single state election official in the country who has seen widespread irregularities. The Department of Homeland Security described the 2020 election as “the most secure in American history.”

Weird that this is how he wants to tie the bow on his career.

Giuliani is not a cheap date, apart from that one time at the Four Seasons garden center.

Rudy Giuliani asked for $20,000 a day to assist the Trump campaign’s legal efforts in battleground states, according to the New York Times.

The Times:

The request stirred opposition from some of Mr. Trump’s aides and advisers, who appear to have ruled out paying that much, and it is unclear how much Mr. Giuliani will ultimately be compensated.

Since Mr. Giuliani took over management of the legal effort, Mr. Trump has suffered a series of defeats in court and lawyers handling some of the remaining cases have dropped out.

A $20,000-a-day rate would have made Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has been Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer for several years, among the most highly compensated attorneys anywhere.

It seems a little greedy when Don is such a humble everyday guy and has all those kids to put through school.

See the cross and cleavage? Did I call it or what?

“End of” is not a persuasive rhetorical device, let alone an argument.

The word “are” is not magic. Saying Xs are Ys doesn’t change reality. I can say “houses are turnips” but that doesn’t make it true, not even if I go on to say “End of.”

Women are human. Women are people. Those are reasonable claims, and true if we all agree on what “women” means and what “human” and “people” mean.

People have rights. That’s a moral claim more than it is a factual claim, and there’s a lot of disagreement over what those rights are exactly, so saying “End of” after that one is also pretty silly. It’s not end of so much as beginning of.

One of the debatable rights these quarrels have made central lately is the “right” to be seen, accepted, endorsed, “validated” as whatever you say you are. I think it takes only about 5 seconds worth of thought to see how precarious the idea of such a right is, since if it were a real right we could all empty each other’s bank accounts.

And then there’s the image.

End of.

Well that’s crossing a line.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), to question the validity of legally cast absentee ballots in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state.

SENATOR Lindsey Graham has been pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to get rid of legal ballots.

That’s…a crime, isn’t it? Isn’t there a federal law against trying to mess with votes and/or intimidate voters? Isn’t that just a straight-up you can be prosecuted crime?

(looks it up)

Yes, it is. There are state laws and federal laws against doing this shit.

Raffensperger and his wife have been getting threats, including death threats.

“Other than getting you angry, it’s also very disillusioning,” Raffensperger said of the threats, “particularly when it comes from people on my side of the aisle. Everyone that is working on this needs to elevate their speech. We need to be thoughtful and careful about what we say.” He said he reported the threats to state authorities.

The pressure on Raffensperger, who has bucked his party in defending the state’s voting process, comes as Georgia is in the midst of a laborious hand recount of about 5 million ballots. President-elect Joe Biden has a 14,000-vote lead in the initial count.

Trump won Michigan by 10 thousand votes in 2016. I just looked it up.

In the interview, Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested, as counties administer elections in Georgia.

Chair of the Judiciary Committee, folks.

The Glinner update tells us there is a social worker, therapist and adjunct associate professor of social work at the University of Southern California called Ken Howard who thinks JK Rowling needs to be punished.

Ruth spotted him commenting on a thread about JK Rowling on the LGBTQ Nation Facebook page. In comments he now appears to have deleted, Howard stated that Rowling’s defence of women’s sex-based rights needs punishing “by way of a traumatic vaginal injury”.

It’s weird what a lot of angry trans activists or allies go straight to that. Not she’s wrong, not she’s wrong and doing harm, but she needs to be violently attacked in the genitals.

But Rowling isn’t stoking and abetting violence against trans women.

It’s funny how men like Ken Howard love trans women so fiercely and hate women even more fiercely. What does that suggest? To me it suggests that they know damn well trans women are not women, and that their loyalty is to other men while their violent loathing is reserved for women. Not pretend women, not trans women, but real women, the kind it’s possible to punish by way of a traumatic vaginal injury.

Rowling of course does not “promote trans women to be raped, maimed, or killed.” She doesn’t do that or anything resembling it, but therapist dude here does literally that toward her.

Ken Howard is the founder and director of GayTherapyLA. On his website he states, “I have devoted my professional career as a therapist almost exclusively to working with gay men as individuals or in gay male couples”. Only a couple of months ago he wrote about the need for gay men to have their own safe spaces.

So he gets that gay men need safe spaces, but he wants to see Rowling get a traumatic injury in the vagina for saying the same about women.

Unpleasant fella.

Good question.

I answered it by, basically, expanding on the “women have to signal obedience to the patriarchy” point, but there are probably further reasons (which is not to say that any of them are good reasons). The VP has more room for experiment, I think. If Biden did it it would look flaky and pathetic, like trying to be down with the kids. Partly it’s probably as simple as “Harris is young enough to get away with it.”

But why doesn’t she recognize it as obedience to the patriarchy? Now that’s something I would love to know.

Is it a coup or is it not? Ece Temelkuran has relevant experience:

President Trump’s refusal to concede to his successful challenger is “giving great comfort” to “authoritarian regimes” around the world, said Joe Biden’s biographer on CNN. “This is a source of delight [for them] … ” Turkey, my country, falls into that category of authoritarian regimes. But I can tell you that what is happening in the US is a source of horror, not delight, for those on the ground. We know the signs of when a political crisis becomes a de facto coup – so here’s a word of warning.

…

[A] spectre of hesitation is haunting Washington. While the Trump administration is doing its best to sow confusion and challenge the mail-in ballots that helped deliver Biden a victory, the president-elect is acting coolly “presidential”; he is receiving calls from world leaders, which, he suggests, are the first steps in restoring respect for the US across the world. This courtly behaviour, this “wait and see” approach towards the incumbent, depends on trusting the health of US institutions.

But contemporary authoritarianism works not by explicitly oppressing the people, but by accelerating the moral rot of already weakened institutions. Everything is riding on how those arms of the state and society – from the Senate and the supreme court to the press and the most insignificant of local public office – behave in the coming few days and weeks. And Trump has been manipulating these institutions for four years: see the way he used his term to pack the courts with rightwing judges at dizzying speed. Even the openly Biden-supporting media is hesitating to call a spade a spade, because they believe the institutions will prevail. Make no mistake, this is an attempted coup. If it were happening in Turkey the world’s media would not think twice about calling it so.

And we’re failing to shut it down. He could still bring it off.

Those who are analysing his behaviour in terms of psychology, referring to his famous allergy to losing, must be reminded: coups don’t always begin with a dramatic Reichstag fire, but through obscure and elusive machinations. Since the Americans might not know about our countries as much as we do about theirs, we can tell them that it has happened just like this here too – we trusted the institutions and were certain the leader wouldn’t dare.

Today’s authoritarian societies are not fully formed dictatorships, single-party states – they don’t need to be. They manufacture crises and prolong political instability, keeping the masses on their toes, but ensuring leaders can act with impunity. American democrats shouldn’t expect a clear-cut power-grab from Trump, but rather a maddeningly obscure process that keeps everything up in the air until the masses are exhausted and lose interest. Even if he accepts reality and his electoral loss, Trump’s “movement” will see its task as running a parallel political reality for the next four years that will constantly threaten Biden’s legitimacy.

Cheerful.

Sorry but this is just silly. Obama doing the book promo:

“I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up,” Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic. “The John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code … the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the 30s and 40s and before that.

“There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully – in fact, he defends the vulnerable against bullies. And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich – the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure,” Obama added.

Those are all actors. In fact they’re all the specific type of actors known as movie stars. They didn’t always play the strong silent cowboy role, much less the defender of the vulnerable against bullies. I get what he’s driving at, I think, but I wish we could manage to think about such things without needing to point to movie stars.

Still.

The Detroit Free Press reports:

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Monday denounced as shocking and reckless a call from a Trump administration official for Michigan residents to “rise up” over new coronavirus restrictions she announced Sunday.

“It’s just incredibly reckless, considering everything that has happened, everything that is going on,” Whitmer said in a call with Capitol reporters.

On Sunday night, Whitmer announced a three-week closure of indoor service at bars and restaurants, closure of the Detroit casinos and suspension of in-person learning for high school and college students, starting Wednesday, along with other measures aimed at bringing down surging coronavirus numbers.

Soon after Whitmer’s news conference, Scott Atlas, President Donald Trump’s top coronavirus adviser, tweeted: “The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept.”

In October, federal and state officials arrested 14 men in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap Whitmer and put her on trial for “treason.” Evidence in the case suggests the men were connected with armed anti-government groups and saw Whitmer as “a tyrant” because of emergency orders she had issued to control the coronavirus.

October, let’s remember, is last month. Scott Atlas, Trump’s top coronavirus adviser who is not a virologist or an epidemiologist, is telling people to “rise up” against measures to control a surging pandemic. We’re living a nightmare.

Trump really wants to get that pesky wildlife refuge destroyed.

In a last-minute push to achieve its long-sought goal of allowing oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, the Trump administration on Monday announced that it would begin the formal process of selling leases to oil companies.

That sets up a potential sale of leases just before Jan 20, Inauguration Day, leaving the new administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has opposed drilling in the refuge, to try to stop the them after the fact.

“The Trump administration is trying a ‘Hail Mary’ pass,” said Jenny Rowland-Shea, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal group in Washington. “They know that what they’ve put out there is rushed and legally dubious.”

But it’s worth it to try to smash and break more of everything.

And this has happened:

Her profile now says

“She left because she understood the value of defiance”

so I bet we can figure out what her defiance is about.

Quite the sexist pig, Glenn Greenwald is.

She had it coming, right? She talked back? She didn’t obey? She refused to submit?

Hur hur look at the Karen hur hur.

Meanwhile #WhiteHouseKaren is trending on Twitter. Who? Trump. He’s a Karen. Geddit?? He’s a whiny little bitch, aka a Karen, hur hur hur.

Trump has a low opinion of most Americans.

Who?

Oh.

Tiny as in smaller than most high schools. But good enough for Trump!

In all fairness, we hate him right back. Our reasons are better though.

Lisa Allardice talks to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

The reason for our call is the announcement that Adichie has won the public vote in the Winner of Winner’s award, celebrating 25 years of the Women’s prize for fiction. She won the award, when it was sponsored by Orange, in 2007, for her epic war novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, beating many of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.

The prize that was necessary because the people who awarded prizes kept overlooking women.

She hopes that the election of Biden will usher in a return to public civility. “I’m really excited at the idea that the discourse across the country will not sound like childish name calling. There’s a sadness there that this is how low the bar has sunk,” she says. “When you are Nigerian there are things that are familiar to you. You don’t expect them to happen in America. Trump showed me how fragile democracy is, how fragile what we consider the norms are.”

Especially the norm that bullying is bad.

When I last spoke to Adichie following the paperback publication of Dear Ijeawele in 2018, her manifesto for bringing up a feminist daughter, she had recently been on the wrong end of what she calls “the American liberal orthodoxy” for comments she made arguing that the experiences of trans women are distinct from those of women born female. She has no truck with “cancel culture” (her quote marks). “There’s a sense in which you aren’t allowed to learn and grow. Also forgiveness is out of the question. I find it so lacking in compassion. How much of our wonderfully complex human selves are we losing?” she asks. “I think in America the worst kind of censorship is self-censorship, and it is something America is exporting to every part of the world. We have to be so careful: you said the wrong word you must be crucified immediately.” She was interested by “all the noise” sparked by JK Rowling’s article on sex and gender, “a perfectly reasonable piece” in her view, earlier this year. “Again JK Rowling is a woman who is progressive, who clearly stands for and believes in diversity.” She blames social media for this rush to censure, which she finds both “cruel and sad. And in terms of ideas, it is fundamentally uninteresting. The orthodoxy, the idea that you are supposed to mouth the words, it is so boring.”

Boring, simple-minded, and not true.

Oh goody – another man on a site purportedly for women, raging about a woman who writes something he dislikes.

Remember went J.K. Rowling went fully mask off about her transphobia in June, publishing an essay on her personal website about how she thinks trans women pose a threat to cis women’s personal safety? And how she, the second-highest paid author in the world worth at least $670 million, feels “police[d]” by trans randos on Twitter who don’t like her tweets (and all while failing to mention the concurrent worldwide uprising against the actual police that was just getting started at the time, to boot)? I know! Truly bananas! If I were a multimillionaire who hated trans women, I would simply go be rich and transmisogynistic in my Scrooge McDuck-style money vault in peace. The derangement! Unhinged!

But he’s not, he’s a trans woman who hates women, and does it noisily at Jezebel. Harron Walker, he calls himself, and there’s a nice little thing next to his byline where it says “Filed to: DIRT BAG” with a more arrow, under which it lists JK Rowling, Mariah Carey, and the target of his current rage, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Isn’t that cute? Isn’t it winsome? If he didn’t identify as a woman he probably wouldn’t do that, but he does identify as a woman, so I guess calling women he disagrees with “DIRT BAG” is fine. In other words same old same old: trans activism is the new misogyny.

What’s his problem?

Well, at least one person thought the Harry Potter lady’s essay was good: novelist and writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, and, probably most notably slash perhaps most ironically now, We Should All Be Feminists. In a new interview with The Guardian, Adichie refers to Rowling’s screed as “a perfectly reasonable piece,” calling its author “a woman who is progressive, who clearly stands for and believes in diversity.”

I don’t think feminism needs men like Harron Walker pontificating about the feminism of women like Adichie or Rowling, much less calling them DIRT BAG and sneering at the “irony” of their feminism.

Adichie’s comments are disappointing, obviously, but they’re not exactly surprising. Three years ago, the author faced deserved criticism for saying that she finds the idea that trans women are women “difficult” to accept, countering that “trans women are trans women” and that “gender is not biology.” Hemming and hawing over this for years on end is so mind-numbingly dull. Just call me a dude and let us both get on with our days!

You’re a dude – and a foul-mouthed woman-hating dude at that.

Yikes. They go on thinking it’s fake even when they have it.

Patricia Marx in the New Yorker last July:

With so many people homebound these past few months, indoors has become the new outdoors. It is where you exercise, digitally chat with friends, and, of course, work. But it is also still the indoors, where you sleep, eat, and putter. This can make for frequent wardrobe changes. Or you can give up and wear the same shredded sweatpants day after day. In April, a Florida circuit judge named Dennis Bailey sent a letter to local lawyers about proper attire during Zoom court hearings. “It is remarkable how many attorneys appear inappropriately on camera,” he wrote. “We’ve seen many lawyers in casual shirts and blouses, with no concern for ill-grooming, in bedrooms with the master bed in the background, etc. One male lawyer appeared shirtless and one female attorney appeared still in bed, still under the covers. So, please, if you don’t mind, let’s treat court hearings as court hearings.”

For hours after I read that I kept thinking of the one female attorney snuggled up in bed at a court hearing and laughing myself sick.