The NY Times researched the overlap between the race-baiting jargon of Trump and Fox News bullies, and the various racist massacres of the past few years. There’s a lot of it.

To single out one item from a long piece…

Rush Limbaugh issued a grim prognosis to his millions of radio listeners: if the immigrants from Central America weren’t stopped, the United States would lose its identity. “The objective is to dilute and eventually eliminate or erase what is known as the distinct or unique American culture,” Mr. Limbaugh said, adding: “This is why people call this an invasion.”

But that’s an illusion. The idea that there’s such a thing as “the distinct or unique American culture,” and that Rush Limbaugh knows what it is, and that it’s a permanent, static, unchanging thing is an illusion, and a damn silly one at that. What culture? Which one? The Sioux, the Cherokee, the Tlingit? The one in and around Santa Fe in the 17th century? Slave culture? Gullah culture? Mississippi Delta culture? Cajun? Lower East Side? The Heights? Chicago? Detroit?

We know what he thinks he means – white people, men mostly, plus their shadowy wives, speaking Murkan English the way he, Limbaugh, speaks it, and growing up reciting The Pledge at school every day, going to church (Protestant) every Sunday and getting misty-eyed when The National Tune is played before every football game. That culture.

But that culture isn’t universal or eternal and it sure as hell doesn’t represent all there is to this country. It’s a big place with a very messy history, and it’s not capable of having one simple monoculture. The culture has never stood still, and even Limbaugh wouldn’t want it to have. Just for a start, where would he be without the culture of shock jock radio and screaming angry white guys?

Now wait just a damn minute.

FiveThirtyEight has campaign advice, which is one of my least favorite genres of post or article or book or any other item of communication. But in addition to that…whaaaaaaaat?

Some voters are plainly worried about whether a woman can defeat President Trump in 2020. But maybe they shouldn’t be.

This might seem like a strange argument to make — after all, I recently wrote an article outlining the many challenges that women face when they run for office. But the thing is, men can also be hurt by some of those same stereotypes, and while the bar is higher for women, men also need to convince voters that they’re strong, decisive and assertive enough for the job. What’s more, gender is likely to be a defining issue in the 2020 race even if the Democrats don’t put a woman at the top of the ticket, in part because tough-guy masculinity is so central to how Trump campaigns and how he governs.

Excuse me? Bozo the Clown projects “tough-guy masculinity”? Are they serious? The ridiculous goldy hair that flaps in the breeze? The baggy suit on the puffy lazy body? The brazen, copious cheating at golf? The tiny boneless hands making their two pathetic meaningless gestures? The fake tan? The whiny tweets? The compulsive talk talk talking? The ignorance, the clumsiness, the vulgarity, the general absurdity and grotesquery of him? That projects tough-guy masculinity? I don’t think so. Bullying, yes, noise, yes, bad manners, yes, but do those really add up to tough-guy masculinity?

I say no.

Not Donald Trump

Last December I did a post about Julia Beck, a lesbian feminist who was pushed off the Baltimore LGBTQ Commission’s Law and Policy Committee at the behest of a “trans lesbian.”

Last night she and her lover were kicked out of a Baltimore bar. She tells the story in a public Facebook post:

Tonight me and my lover were kicked out of Ottobar. We were drinking beer, talking, kissing, and dancing- having a good time! Suddenly two staff members approached us on the dance floor, one woman and one man. The woman said we had to leave but did not explain why. The man took my friend’s beer can from her hands and crushed it while staring her down. We asked many times why two lesbians would be unwelcome in a so-called “safe space”. The only reason we were given was that I made people feel unsafe.

We held each other and refused to leave. Staff members pushed us off the dance floor and threatened to call the police. Another male staff member joined the fray and compared me to David Duke (KKK) because I “dehumanized trans people” on Fox News.

Women near us were severely confused, asking us and the staff members what is happening. One woman said the only people making others feel unsafe were the male staff members physically pushing us for no apparent reason. The owner of Ottobar approached us and personally asked us to leave. We explained to her that we had not engaged with anyone but each other and the bartenders. How could our joyous existence be perceived as a threat?

After ten minutes of protesting this unfair treatment, we left the bar. One woman who had seen the entire ordeal said she and 15 other women left the bar in solidarity. Another woman outside the venue said she overheard my crime was transphobia and putting up stickers. We engaged in a sensible conversation about male violence until the owner approached us again and said we could not be within 50 feet of the bar.

I am curious to know how my presence, my mere lesbian existence, could ever make anyone feel unsafe. What is wrong with two women talking, drinking beer, or grooving on the dance floor? To quote Sonia Johnson, only “men in weakness” are threatened by women standing, drinking, dancing, loving in our power. Viva las Lesbianas ⚢

Time was, presidents didn’t promote wack conspiracy theories out in the open where everyone could see. Now, however…

Trump shared a tweet and video from conservative comedian Terrence Williams that claimed without evidence that former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — Trump’s 2016 presidential election rival — were responsible for Epstein’s death. The Federal Bureau of Prisons and Attorney General Bill Barr said Epstein died in an “apparent suicide” while in federal custody.

As a result of Trump’s retweet, the video received more than 3 million views on Twitter by Sunday morning — more than triple Williams’ most recent videos. Both Trump and Bill Clinton were friendly with Epstein in previous decades, but Trump seized on the conspiracy theory Saturday in his latest dig at the Clintons.

Because something something the base something deplorables.

Trump’s tweet promoting the conspiracy theory came about an hour after Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio warned of the dangers of spreading partisan conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death.

“Scrutiny of how #Epstein was able to commit suicide is warranted,” Rubio tweeted. “But the immediate rush to spread conspiracy theories about someone on the ‘other side’ of partisan divide having him killed illustrates why our society is so vulnerable to foreign disinformation & influence efforts.”

White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway appeared on Fox News Sunday defending the President. “I think the President just wants everything to be investigated,” Conway said when asked about Trump’s controversial retweet.

Right, uh huh, yes, that’s the way to make sure everything is investigated – retweeting a wild claim by a comedian. I’m sure the FBI is pursuing that hot lead at this very moment. Thanks, Mister President!

What are barriers? What do we mean by the word? What are we talking about when we talk about barriers?

For instance what do we mean by it when we’re talking about improving the representation of women?

The Scottish Government introduced its Gender Representation on Public Boards Act in March last year to “improve the representation of women on the boards of Scottish public authorities” and aim to ensure that at least 50 per cent of non-executive roles are filled by women.

However in the latest twist in the row over women’s rights and those of trans women, a new consultation on how the legislation should work in practice, has seen concerns raised about the government’s definition of the word “woman”.

So we know what’s coming. The government will have a fancy new definition of the word “woman” that allows it to “be inclusive” of some men. No longer will “women” mean mere adult human females – that’s far too stuffy and old-fashioned. No, now it means anyone who has a deep spiritual sense of being womany…so that lets most of us dreary old literal women out.

In the new Bill, the definition was changed from “a female of any age” – the definition in the UK Equality Act of 2010, which protects women against sex discrimination – to include a “person who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment”.

Because?

A person can have “the protected characteristic of gender reassignment” (whatever that means) without being a woman, so why does the definition of woman need to be changed to include such a person? Does it also cover people with an allergy to horses, people who dislike cauliflower, people who have been to Burkina Fasso? Why is the definition of “woman” something that needs random expanding in this bizarre way? It’s like changing the definition of “dog” to include roses and ormolu clocks.

The then equalities secretary, Angela Constance, accepted the amendment because “we want the Bill to break down barriers and not create them”.

This is why I asked. What does that mean? What is she thinking? If you have a law to protect, say, people with disabilities, does that “create barriers”? Should that bill, once passed, be expanded to include people who identify as disabled but are not in fact disabled? Would continuing to restrict the bill to people with actual disabilities create a barrier?

According to the government’s Equality Impact Assessment, carried out at the time the legislation passed, the definition of woman was changed after the issue was “raised by respondents in relation to the inclusiveness of the language used”, to include non-binary people as well as the “definitions used for female and male in it, which it was felt should be ‘identify as female’ or ‘identify as male’ to avoid issues for transgender people.”

Thin end of the wedge, wasn’t it, and now here we are, with women being told to move over to make room for men who claim to be women when they want to compete against them in weightlifting competitions. There’s such a thing as too much inclusiveness.

Women and girls who don’t like it should just go away and find something else to do.

Former Australian cricket captain Alex Blackwell says female players who do not want to play alongside a transgender athlete should find another sport to play.

…

In an exclusive interview with Macquarie Sport Radio‘s Cam Reddin, Blackwell urged women and girls who did not feel comfortable playing or changing alongside trans players to play something else.

“They can choose to go to a sport they’re more comfortable with. It’s up to them,” Blackwell told Macquarie Sports Radio.

“To deprive [transgender people] of access to sport would be wrong. We won’t be discriminating based on trans or gender diverse identity,” she said.

Blackwell rejected suggestions some female players may feel disadvantaged under these rules.

But it’s not about just feeling disadvantaged, let alone “uncomfortable.” It’s about being at a disadvantage: the well-known physical disadvantage without which men would never have been able to dominate women in the first place.

Grame Wood at the Atlantic tries to figure out That Photo from El Paso – the one in which Trump is grinning and thumbs-upping.

First there are the smiles, so chipper in the aftermath of mass murder. For some reason, this Trump smile calls to mind the one in his famous tweeted portrait in which he’s eating a taco bowl (“I love Hispanics!”) served by Trump Tower Grill. Then there is the thumbs-up, also present to signal approval of the taco bowl, and in this case to signal approval of what, exactly? The narrow survival of the infant? The heroism of the hospital staff and first responders who cared for the wounded? Somehow neither of these possibilities seems quite right, and contemplation has brought me no closer to a better answer.

Wood is overthinking it. Trump is not complicated. He’s just doing an inappropriate bizarre insulting thing because he’s too stupid to do anything else. Camera – pose – do thumbs-up and grin like a good sport. It’s no more than that. He doesn’t connect things, so he doesn’t connect the hospital photo with the reason he’s at the hospital, he just sees a camera and some people arranged in front of it. It’s hard to overestimate how thick he is; he’s always thicker than we can believe.

In the immediate bereavement of an infant’s parents, nothing is needed but respectful silence. This is never truer than for a man like Trump, who cannot speak without giving offense and enjoying it. The photograph was released by Melania and could have been taken in the spirit of mourning that the occasion deserved, or it could have been taken not at all. It is one of the most twisted things I have seen in a long time.

Yes but he did the same thing in Parkland. I remember posting some of those photos, and they were exactly the same.

This one for instance:

Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Two years ago Taylor Dumpson was elected student government president of American University –

the first black woman president in the school’s history. The day she took office, several bananas with racist messages were found hanging from nooses.

The nooses drew headlines, which got the attention of white supremacist Andrew Anglin, the founder and publisher of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.

Four days after the bananas were found on the American University campus, Anglin encouraged his followers to troll Dumpson in a Daily Stormer post.

Alongside her picture, Anglin posted links to Dumpson’s personal Facebook page and the AU student government Twitter account, encouraging his readers to “let her know you fully support her fight against bananas.”

So they did. A federal judge ruled yesterday that Anglin and one of his followers have to pay Dumpson over 700k.

In her decision, US District Judge Rosemary Collyer said that Anglin’s actions “were racially motivated and intentionally resulted in a campaign of racial and gender harassment.”

“The extent of the troll storm was significant and Mr. Anglin, through the Daily Stormer, intended that result or was reckless in his actions,” said Collyer.

This ruling comes a day after a Montana judge entered a final order that Anglin pay $14 million to another woman he encouraged his followers to harass.

Anglin appears to be in hiding.

Lindsay Shepherd tweeted a video clip of Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv in the act of planning a new way to harass minority women in service jobs.

What Yaniv says in the clip:

I was just at the Pacific Center, Mall, and I went to New York Fries, and this is going to be on my next human rights complaint, but I asked for some fries, and they literally said
“Not for you, sir, you’re, uh, you’re trans gender” – they put it like that.

Notice the stumble at “you’re” – is that a tell that he’s making it up? Did he stumble because he forgot what he’d planned to make “them” say?

Shepherd’s commentary:

I just called the manager of New York Fries to see if this was true. It’s not. The manager witnessed this interaction. All that happened was that Yaniv approached (surprise, surprise) a female Indian cashier, ordered & then left quickly, & Yaniv’s mom came & yelled at them

Yaniv already filed a complaint with New York Fries head office. Manager said his staff doesn’t even really know the word “transgender” so they wouldn’t have said that, and that working in downtown Vancouver they are accustomed to serving transgender and disabled people

When are Yaniv and his mama going to be arrested for harassment and making false allegations?

Maaaaybe we can begin to see the problem now?

No, of course not, that’s just silly.

Guy walks into a Walmart carrying an assault rifle and wearing body armor. April Fool! In August! 6 days after another guy murdered 20 people in a Walmart with an assault rifle while in body armor. It was a test. That’s all, just a test. What’s everybody so riled up about? He was testing Walmart’s loyalty to the sacred right to carry assault rifles everywhere.

“I wanted to know if that Walmart honoured the second amendment,” the 20-year-old told police after his arrest.

Prosecutors have charged him with making a terrorist threat.

If found guilty, the charge could result in a four-year prison sentence and a fine of $10,000 (£8,300), Greene County prosecutor Dan Patterson said in a statement.

I bet he scared the bejeezus out of everybody in that store.

Prosecutor Dan Patterson said that while residents of Springfield, Missouri, were allowed to carry weapons, “that right does not allow an individual to act in a reckless and criminal manner endangering other citizens.”

Oh really. How, exactly, does that work? If they’re allowed to carry weapons, how are they supposed to know they can’t carry them into Walmart? If they are allowed to carry them into Walmart, how can all the people there avoid terror and panic and shock? What does it mean to be allowed to carry weapons but not allowed to carry weapons? What were you assholes expecting to happen?

CNN reported yesterday:

The Environmental Protection Agency told staff scientists that it was no longer opposing a controversial Alaska mining project that could devastate one of the world’s most valuable wild salmon fisheries just one day after President Trump met with Alaska’s governor, CNN has learned.

It’s not really “could,” from what I’ve been reading. It’s will. It’s there is no way it won’t.

The EPA publicly announced the reversal July 30, but EPA staff sources tell CNN that they were informed of the decision a month earlier, during a hastily arranged video conference after Trump’s meeting with Gov. Mike Dunleavy. The governor, a supporter of the project, emerged from that meeting saying the president assured him that he’s “doing everything he can to work with us on our mining concerns.”

And “everything he can” is unfortunately a lot, because he considers himself a dictator and acts accordingly and it seems that no one can stop him.

Dunleavy met with Trump aboard Air Force One on June 26, as the President’s plane was on the tarmac in Alaska. The President had stopped there on his way to the G20 summit in Japan.

Four EPA sources with knowledge of the decision told CNN that senior agency officials in Washington summoned scientists and other staffers to an internal videoconference on June 27, the day after the Trump-Dunleavy meeting, to inform them of the agency’s reversal. The details of that meeting are not on any official EPA calendar and have not previously been reported.

Those sources said the decision disregards the standard assessment process under the Clean Water Act, cutting scientists out of the process.

So in other words the decision is illegal, but that won’t matter.

The same day Trump and Dunleavy met in June, the EPA publicly announced that it would begin reconsidering whether to withdraw the Clean Water Act restriction on the Pebble Mine. EPA scientists and staff believed that they would then have weeks or months to reassess previous findings and potentially permanently stop the project, according to the sources.

Instead, immediately after Trump met with Dunleavy, EPA officials received an invitation from EPA headquarters to attend the video conference the next day, June 27.
During that video conference, EPA General Counsel Matthew Leopold said that a decision had been made to lift the restriction on the Pebble Mine proposal and that no further consideration of the matter was needed, sources said.

“I was dumbfounded,” an EPA insider said. “We were basically told we weren’t going to examine anything. We were told to get out of the way and just make it happen.”

Even some Republicans think this is outrageous.

Christine Todd Whitman, who served as an Environmental Protection Agency administrator during the George W. Bush administration, said the EPA’s decision to lift the restriction on the mine before the agency’s scientists fully reviewed the matter could violate the Clean Water Act.

“It’s politics trumping policy and good science,” said Whitman, who in 2017 joined two other former EPA administrators who served under Republican presidents in opposing the mine due to its estimated environmental impacts. “If this goes forward now with all the holes and the insufficiencies … there’ll be a lawsuit, no question about that.”

Let’s hope it’s successful.

Remember the IPCC report the other day on threats to the food supply? This is a new one, and one that we could easily avoid by just not doing it.

So there won’t be testimony from Jeffrey Epstein. He hanged himself again, and this time he succeeded.

Following news of his death, his alleged victims condemned his suicide and what they described as a lack of justice for them and other accusers.

“I am extremely mad and hurt thinking he once again thought he was above us and took the easy way out … I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that’s really true,” Jena-Lisa Jones, 30, an alleged victim of Epstein when she was 14 in Florida, said in a statement. “God will have his judgement now.”

Jennifer Araoz, 32, who claimed that Epstein raped her when she was 14, called on authorities to “pursue and prosecute his accomplices and enablers.

“I am angry Jeffrey Epstein won’t have to face his survivors of his abuse in court. We have to live with the scars of his actions for the rest of our lives, while he will never face the consequences of the crimes he committed the pain and trauma he caused so many people,” Araoz said.

Michelle Licata, an alleged Florida victim of Epstein when she was 16, said she didn’t want anyone to die.

“I just wanted him to be held accountable for his actions. Simple as that,” she said.

Law enforcement sources told ABC News the criminal case against Epstein will not end with his death. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan will continue to evaluate the evidence and hear from his accusers, the sources said.

But he got away with it almost unscathed for 66 years.

There’s a feeling that maybe maybe maybe just possibly when you go to visit people injured in a mass shooting you shouldn’t pose for photos grinning broadly and making “yeeeha!” gestures. Maybe.

A backlash is building over a picture posted by Melania Trump on Twitter that showed her and Donald Trump smiling broadly while holding a baby who was orphaned in the mass shooting in El Paso.

On a visit to El Paso this week, the president flashed a thumbs-up when posing with the two-month-old, whose parents Andre and Jordan Anchondo were shot dead last Saturday. When the picture was posted on the first lady’s Twitter account on Thursday, it prompted outrage.

What, because it was crass and tasteless and staggeringly unfeeling? But this is Donald Trump and the woman who is still married to him.

The orphaned child, named Paul, had been brought back to the hospital – reportedly at the request of White House during the visit by the Trumps on Wednesday. The baby’s uncle, standing next to Donald Trump, is reportedly a Trump supporter, as was the deceased father.

The baby was injured, breaking his fingers, in the shooting, after his mother died trying to protect him and her body fell on him. His father had dived to try to shield her as bullets flew.

I’m sure the baby enjoyed the outing very much.

Doctors at the Del Sol medical center in El Paso, where some of the survivors are still being treated, later said the president appeared to “lack empathy” after he boasted during the visit that he drew a larger crowd at a January rally in the city than one held by “crazy” Beto O’Rourke.

Yes, that does seem like an appearance of lacking empathy.