Benjamin Wittes on Trump’s Tantrum:

There exists no law or rule that compels a president to acknowledge the legitimacy of his defeat—or even the fact of it—except in the very limited sense that he has to vacate the office.

And he doesn’t have to do that until January 20. Until then he can tantrum his wee socks off.

So yes, the president is allowed to sulk. He is allowed to be the sorest of sore losers. He is allowed to once again display before the entire world the complete triumph of ego over patriotism, of self-interestedness over public-spiritedness, within his heart. There is, actually, nothing to do about it if he wants to play it this way; there is no way to stop him. And in and of itself, it’s not even a particularly grave problem. It is certainly sad that the United States has a president who so completely fails the basic tests of honor and decency. It would be lovely to see him just once rise to some occasion, any occasion. But it’s hardly a surprise that he can’t or he won’t or he doesn’t want to. He is, after all, Donald Trump.

I was thinking about that earlier today – how odd it is, in a way, that he didn’t grab such an easy chance to surprise us all. He has to go, so why not confound all our expectations by being generous and cheerful about it? He could take advantage of that maddening cognitive glitch which causes us to give more credit to people for being uncharacteristically decent than for being decent all the time. But noooooooooo, he has to act like a stupid petulant spoiled emperor up to the last second.

The bigger problem than the president’s refusal to concede the race is the toleration of that refusal by the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans. Yes, a few senators—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse—have congratulated Biden, and a few others have said that Biden should have access to transition resources and intelligence briefings.

But the Republican leadership in both houses of Congress have played along with the president’s obstinate refusal to face reality, pretending that there are still important questions about the integrity of the vote to litigate and resolve….And the president is capitalizing on the opportunity that McConnell and other congressional Republicans are providing.

Wittes then lists the ways Trump is capitalizing.

The administrator of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, has refused to “ascertain” (in the language of the law) that Biden is the “apparent” winner of the election, thus blocking transition funding and preventing certain other transition activity from beginning.

Pompeo said there would be a second Trump administration teehee. Biden is still not getting intelligence briefings.

More generally, the Washington Post reported on Nov. 9 that “[t]he Trump White House on Monday instructed senior government leaders to block cooperation with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team.”

And there’s the purge at the Pentagon.

Wittes goes on to explain how difficult it would be to steal the election in reality, and that all this sinister carrying on is dangerous anyway.

First, it is a harm to the orderly transition of power. Merely raising the specter of not honoring the results of an election, merely inducing democratic anxiety such that as serious-minded a person as Bill Kristol could write a piece like the one quoted above, is a democratic harm. Denying information to the Biden transition makes it harder to govern coming in. Conveying uncertainty to foreign actors is dangerous; it invites misunderstanding, and misunderstanding can be deadly.

Second there’s that pesky norms issue again – Trump has kicked them into smithereens with his lying sulks and sulky lies.

Finally, fourth, there’s the chance that I’m wrong that Biden’s prevailing in the election’s aftermath—that the automatic processes I have described are just a little bit less automatic than I think they are. There’s the chance that Republicans, having dug themselves into the Trump hole, don’t stop digging when the results are certified, that they don’t quite know how to back down. There’s the chance that state legislatures are little more aggressively partisan than I imagine, or that a few courts go off the deep end.

So that’s cheerful.

The mass-murderer of women Peter Sutcliffe died in prison yesterday. Women everywhere braced for more reporting that focused on him instead of the women whose lives he stole. The Yorkshire Post got it right.

Today I learn that there’s a group called Zero Tolerance. Of what? Violence against women.

Zero Tolerance is a Scottish charity working to end men’s violence against women by promoting gender equality and challenging attitudes that normalise violence and abuse.

Good, good. (Mind you, in these troubled times, we need to be careful to say sex equality, but that’s a detail.)

We work to end violence against women through tackling the root cause of this violence – gender inequality. [sex equality]

We began in 1992 with a groundbreaking and radical Edinburgh-based poster campaign. The campaign successfully brought the issue of violence against women out from behind closed doors and into public consciousness by asserting that violence against women is never acceptable.

At Zero Tolerance our vision is clear: a world free of men’s violence against women.

Women need to be able to take power and access an equal share of our nation’s wealth. Men need to concede some of their money and power. We are not asking men to be nice; we are demanding full social, economic and political equality.

Our core belief is that men’s violence against women is preventable and should not be tolerated.

All sounds good.

But wait. What? What’s this?

But…trans women are men. Why would an organization set up to end men’s violence against women announce that it promotes “inclusion” of men and that it seeks to reflect that in everything it does? Why change the subject so thoroughly? Why can’t feminist organizations focus on women’s issues instead of on men’s?

Its position statement

It is our position that trans and non-binary rights are integral to, and contribute to, feminism. Scotland’s violence against women services provide trans inclusive services and trans inclusion plans have been in place since 2012.

Why? How? What do trans and non-binary rights have to do with feminism at all, let alone being integral to them?

There is no explanation, only the usual flat assertion.

This inclusive approach has not given rise to any concern or challenges. Rather, trans women have added to our movements through their support, voluntary work and as staff members.

Well that doesn’t tell us anything. It’s your experience that some men who identify as women make useful employees. All right, but that says nothing about why a feminist group says we must “include” men who identify as women in feminism.

Violence against women, homophobia and transphobia are all rooted in misogyny. We are committed to working with partner LGBTQI+ organisations to end this inequality, discrimination and violence.

It’s not that simple, to put it mildly, and even if it were, it wouldn’t follow that feminism has to “include” men and reflect that “inclusion” in everything it does.

Another one of those “Just a reminder that bullshit bullshit bullshit” tweets.

Yeah. Nobody ever heard of it until the invention of trans.

Strangio was told her transness wasn’t real, and women are told the category “women” isn’t real. What about the toll on women? Women who don’t claim to be men and don’t believe that men can become women – what about the toll on them? On us? Why doesn’t that matter?

I can’t find the tweet that Singal shows us; maybe Strangio deleted it. It’s not all that appropriate for an ACLU spokes.

Oops. He almost accidentally conceded.

Time has already told.

I think there’s a misunderstanding.

“My body, my choice” doesn’t mean you can for instance use your body to punch or kick or stab people. It doesn’t mean you can use your body to grab other people’s groceries or puppies or umbrellas. It doesn’t mean you can risk infecting other people during a lethal pandemic.

This nitwit shouldn’t have been “proud” to tell her colleagues that masks are oppressive. She should instead have thought about how oppressive a bad case of Covid is.

In Georgia, she claims, people don’t care if they infect others. That’s unfortunate at a time when the virus is roaring upwards.

The United States reported another record one-day spike in Covid-19 cases as the outbreak grows more severe and overwhelms some hospitals.

The country reported more than 153,400 new cases on Thursday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That’s the third-straight record one-day spike and has pushed the seven-day average of new U.S. infections to over 131,400, up more than 32% compared with a week ago, according to a CNBC analysis of Hopkins data.

That graph is NOT what we want to see.

Wear the god damn mask.

The law and order party, let’s not forget.

Ah yes, disdain for the idea that slavery was something of a mistake on the part of the people who colonized what became the US. (The forcible colonization also a mistake btw.)

“New” – it’s not new. As many wiser heads pointed out.

Journalist Garrett Graff on Fresh Air yesterday:

GROSS: Let’s start with a couple of the – what you consider most norm-breaking things President Trump has done so far to interfere with the transfer of power.

GRAFF: The biggest one has to just be the simple fact that he has not yet accepted the projected winner of the election being Joe Biden. This is a very different situation than we faced in 2000 with the Florida recount. The state victories across the country are definitive. They are decisive. And Joe Biden looks like he’s actually on his way to a comfortable victory in the Electoral College. And the fact that now, more than a week after the election, Donald Trump has not yet accepted that – he’s not yet given permission for Republican leaders to accept that and not yet given permission for the U.S. government to accept that – is deeply worrisome. There’s a second level of his norm-breaking that we are already beginning to see, which is one of the things that I had speculated about before the election, which is widespread firings of senior government officials, a housecleaning, if you will, among top national security and intelligence leaders in a way that is worrisome from the – a national security perspective amid a transition. We’ve never seen a president in a lame-duck period like this fire, for instance, the defense secretary.

And this is injecting a lot of uncertainty and instability into some very key American institutions at a moment where you are already facing uncertainty and instability amid a presidential transition.

They talk about Trump’s firing of Mark Esper, and the possibility that he did it because Esper said it was illegal and anti-democratic to use the military to quell protests the way Trump wanted to last summer. Trump may think Esper’s replacement will be willing to do what Esper rebuked Trump for wanting to do…which raises the interesting possibility of the US military protecting a full-blown coup by Trump.

GROSS: One of the things you speculate about, which may already be happening, is that President Trump can take revenge on the deep state in his lame-duck weeks. What do you mean by that?

GRAFF: Yeah. I mean, we have seen Donald Trump sort of rail against the government bureaucracy, the career civil servants in the military, in the intelligence community, across the rest of the federal government. And there are sort of two areas to be particularly concerned about in the final weeks of the Trump presidency. The first is, you know, the outright firings that he might make to try to corrupt decision-making in these final weeks, some of which we may already be seeing taking place at places like the Pentagon and the Defense Department.

The second is, basically, Donald Trump creating his own deep state opposition within the federal government. There’s a process that’s technically known in Washington jargon as burrowing in – when you have political appointees shift over into civil service roles, where people who would sort of ordinarily leave with an administration then are now sort of permanently part of the federal government. And we are beginning to see this take place in potentially some very worrisome positions.

I didn’t know they could do that. I thought civil service jobs had to be competitive.

GROSS: So the administrator of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy – who’s a Trump appointee – she has to formally recognize Biden as the president-elect before the transfer of power can actually begin. She’s declined to do that so far. So that’s what is blocking all the transition funding. That’s what’s blocking Biden’s ability to get the presidential daily briefing. It’s what’s blocking his ability to get the funding to launch his new administration. How unprecedented is this?

GRAFF: Totally unprecedented. We’re already calling Joe Biden the president-elect, but there are really two moments where a president officially and legally becomes president-elect. And the first is when he is designated by the GSA administrator as the president-elect in a process that’s known as ascertainment, that the GSA administrator has to ascertain that he is the likely winner of the Electoral College vote and sends him a letter basically saying, Dear Joe Biden, it looks like you are going to be the next president of the United States; you are now officially the president-elect.

And as you said, that unlocks millions of dollars in transition funding for him. It unlocks government office space for his transition staff, government email addresses, government cellphones – I mean, sort of all of the information that agencies and departments have prepared for the transition. It gives his staff the legal authority to show up at agencies and departments and begin to talk with government officials. And it unlocks their ability to receive classified information, including, as you said, the president’s daily brief, the daily intelligence briefing prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In other words Trump is sabotaging everything – sabotaging in the literal sense.

GROSS: Now, I think you said that the head of the General Service Administration, Emily Murphy, is waiting for Trump to concede before she certifies Joe Biden as the president-elect. But does she legally have to wait for Trump to concede before certifying Biden?

GRAFF: Not at all. This is a decision that she alone can make at any time. She can ascertain, officially, Joe Biden as the president-elect whenever she wants, and the fact that she has not is troubling and worrisome and goes against, you know, decades of normal practice of the federal government.

Populism in action.

This is nuts.

[O]ne thing Biden cannot do at this point is move into any government office space or receive government funding for the transition.

A key, if little-known Trump administration official has yet to determine formally that Biden won the election, holding up some crucial resources traditionally available to the president-elect.

Under the 1963 Presidential Transition Act, it’s up to the General Services Administration, or GSA, to determine or “ascertain” the winner of the presidential election, at least as far as starting the process of turning over the keys to the new administration goes.

…

In a statement, the GSA said its administrator “ascertains the apparent successful candidate once a winner is clear based on the process laid out in the Constitution.”

Spoiler: the winner is clear.

The Associated Press and other news organizations reported that Biden gained the electoral votes needed to win the election on Saturday, but President Trump has so far refused to concede and has falsely claimed widespread voter fraud. His team has launched a wave of lawsuits challenging various aspects of the election.

…

Being ascertained as the winner means the president-elect gets office space in each government agency to begin the transition process, along with computers and $9.9 million to begin hiring transition personnel.

In other words being able to get started on the actual work, as opposed to standing around wasting time and falling behind.

David Marchick, who directs the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, said there are important real-world implications for a delayed transition. Marchick points to the delay in the transition to the George W. Bush administration after the Supreme Court ruling.

“That slowed the process of the Bush administration getting their national security team in place. Eight months later, we had 9/11,” Marchick said. “When the 9/11 Commission did their autopsy on what went wrong, one of the things they pointed to was the slow pace of the Bush administration getting their national security team in place. And they said it impaired our ability to react.”

But what does that matter compared to Trump’s ego?

How about that.

Here’s the full statement:

“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result. 

“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

“Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.

“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”

Axios on Trump’s big plans:

President Trump has told friends he wants to start a digital media company to clobber Fox News and undermine the conservative-friendly network, sources tell Axios.

Which is interesting, since he wouldn’t be where he is if it weren’t for Fox.

Some Trump advisers think Fox News made a mistake with an early call (seconded by AP) of President-elect Biden’s win in Arizona. That enraged Trump, and gave him something tangible to use in his attacks on the network.

“Tangible”? I’m not seeing the tangibility. Or the merit, or the reasonability, or anything of that type.

“He plans to wreck Fox. No doubt about it,” said a source with detailed knowledge of Trump’s intentions.

What a guy.

The Age (the Australian paper) has more:

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp shares tumbled with speculation ramping up that President Donald Trump might back or launch a rival news service after he leaves office.

American news site Axios reported on Thursday, citing unidentified sources, that Trump is planning a subscription-based streaming platform similar to Fox Nation, a $US6-a-month service launched two years ago.

Fox shares declined from the start of trading, and the drop deepened after Trump amplified a series of Twitter posts from users criticising Fox News as insufficiently loyal to the president and urging conservatives to switch to rivals such as Newsmax

Nice of him to spend his time trying to create a new career when he’s supposed to be working for us.

H/t Omar

But…who on earth would want to go on a cruise now? And what cruise line would want to risk it?

These people and this cruise line:

One of the first cruise ships to ply through Caribbean waters since the pandemic began ended its trip early after one passenger fell ill and is believed to have Covid-19, officials said on Thursday.

The SeaDream is carrying 53 passengers and 66 crew, with the majority of passengers hailing from the US, according to Sue Bryant, a cruise ship reporter who is aboard the ship.

She told the Associated Press that one passenger became sick on Wednesday and forced the ship to turn back to Barbados, where it had departed from on Saturday. However, the ship had yet to dock in Barbados as local authorities tested those on board.

Gee maybe they’ll get to be quarantined for weeks on the ship.

Bryant said passengers were required to have a negative PCR test to enter Barbados and underwent another test on the dock administered by the ship’s doctor.

“We all felt very safe,” she said, adding that the ship had been implementing strict hygiene protocols. “Yet somehow, Covid appears to have got on board.”

The fact that they all felt safe is not relevant. A virus doesn’t ask if people feel safe or not, it just does what it does.

Waters around the Caribbean have been largely bereft of cruise ships this year, with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspending cruise ship operations at US ports in mid-March. The no-sail order expired on 31 October.

And some fools rushed to take the risk.

That’s not good.

It drives me kind of nuts that Paltrow does this. It’s the same kind of abuse of “celebrity” and money and the power they bring that Trump indulges in. She has no medical training, but she sets herself up as a purveyor of “health”-bestowing consumer goods, based on…nothing. Flowery language, hype, psychobabble, bullshit, vague unpindownable claims. Fraud, in short.

Goop is all excited about goop press.

While we spend a lot of our reading time online, we’re book fans. And some content simply merits a book cover. At the end of 2015, we launched a book imprint because we wanted to share the perspectives of the incredible scientists, healers, and teachers we meet in our pursuit of individual and collective well-being.

What is “well-being”? It’s whatever Gwyneth Paltrow says it is, I suppose. Fasting! Let’s have some “intuitive” fasting! Nothing at all dangerous about that.

It’s too late.

]A]ccording to a new modeling study published in Scientific Reports today, even if we made such drastic reductions permanent, it would still not be enough. The study shows that if we stopped all human-made greenhouse gas emissions immediately, the Earth’s temperatures would continue to rise because of self-sustaining melting ice and permafrost. These “feedback loops” — in which melting ice causes less sunlight to be reflected back into space, which in turn raises temperatures and causes more ice melt — have already been set into motion, the researchers argue.

I read something about it a couple of days ago – the melting tundra. It’s melting so fast and there’s so much of it that it’s going to dump more carbon than we can possibly compensate for even at zero emissions – aka it’s too late.

Humanity “is beyond the point-of-no-return when it comes to halt the melting of the permafrost using greenhouse gas cuts as the single tool,” Jørgen Randers, PhD, professor emeritus of climate strategy at BI Norwegian Business School and lead author of the study, tells Future Human.

For decades, climate scientists have tried to predict the so-called tipping point at which it would be too late to stop global warming — too late to limit the amount the temperature rises, the amount of sea level rise, and the number of lives claimed by both and other climate-induced ecological disasters — through reducing carbon emissions alone. Climate scientists point to either 2030 or 2050 as deadlines for the world to get to zero emissions before runaway climate change kicks in. But according to the new study, no matter how much we reduce emissions now, he says, warming will continue, and the self-sustained melting of Arctic ice and permafrost that has already begun could continue for 500 years.

It’s not 2050 or 2030 or even 2020; we passed it some time ago.

Will carbon sequestration save the day? Well…

To stop self-sustained melting — and the expected rise in temperature and sea level after emissions cease — Randers says the world must undertake a massive effort to capture carbon out of the atmosphere and store it back underground, a technology known as carbon sequestration. And we would have to start sucking at least 33 gigatons out of the air every year, starting this year. For comparison, all animal life on Earth collectively weighs an estimated two gigatons.

It’s kind of a big job.

Trump is “dejected.” Also sulky, whiny, petulant, lazy, irresponsible, stupid, and self-absorbed.

Trump himself was waffling by the hour and day between a pugilistic desire to keep fighting and a more resigned attitude that his efforts will ultimately fail, people who spoke to him said.

Pugilistic? No. Bullying, self-indulgent, narcissistic, piggy, unreasonable, obstinate, dumb, bratty.

But surveyed by CNN, nearly everyone close to Trump said they believed it was only a matter of time before he finds some way to acknowledge he will not be president come January 20 — and said he was likely to pin blame on his baseless claims of a rigged election.

He’s never going to concede, he’s just (at best) going to say he was driven out. It’ll be post-Versailles Germany all over again.

Inside the White House, the current period has taken on the feeling of interregnum, as staffers feel obliged to continue their work and even celebrate Trump’s perceived victory while the President largely discontinues his own official tasks.

Which being translated means “while Trump does zero work.”

His adult sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are encouraging him to continue waging battle, arguing his supporters want to see him keeping up the pressure and that he has little to lose. But others, including their sister Ivanka, have sent a more calibrated message, asking whether it was worth damaging his legacy and potentially his businesses to continue his refusal to concede.

“Calibrated.” Please. The princess is not better than the rest of them.

Trump has spent ample time in front of the TV watching coverage of Biden’s transition, including his public remarks describing Trump’s reluctance to concede an “embarrassment.” He was thrilled when he saw Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mention a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration” during a news conference on Tuesday, one person who spoke to him said.

But he has been dismayed to see foreign leaders, including those he considered friends such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, move swiftly toward congratulating Biden.

He thought they were “friends.” He doesn’t have any friends.

I guess I’d better never go to Norway.

Bi, trans, and nonbinary folks in Norway are celebrating a huge win after the country recently expanded its penal code that previously only protected lesbian and gay people from hate speech to include gender identity and all forms of “sexual orientation.”

…

The penal code states that those who are guilty of hate speech face a fine or up to a year in jail for private comments, and a maximum of three years in jail for public remarks. Furthermore, those charged with violent crimes that are motivated by a victim’s orientation or gender identity will receive harsher sentences.

Since all disputing the dogma around what “trans” means is treated as “transphobic” that means gender critical feminists will be forced to shut up, even in private.

Or will it.

Still, not everyone is happy about the aggressive approach Norway is taking when it comes to LGBTQ+ protections. Some opponents believes the amendments threaten free speech. But as Anine Kierulf, an assistant professor of law at the University of Oslo, explained to Reuters, the statements have to hit a lot of benchmarks to be prosecuted.

“There are a lot of very hateful things you can say about the protected groups,” she said. For prosecution comments must be direct attacks against LGBTQ+ people or include language that intentionally dehumanizes them to the public.

How can remarks in private include language that intentionally dehumanizes people to the public? And who decides what “direct attacks against LGBTQ+ people” means?

THE great delusion of our time –

Nope.

(Also the reminder isn’t “friendly” but that’s another subject.)

Sure, in lots of ways we know more about ourselves than anyone else does, not least because we care more than anyone else does. But by the same token we also distort what we think we know about ourselves, also because we care more than anyone else does.

And there are some things – important things – we can’t know about ourselves as well as other people do. We can’t know how we come across to other people as well as other people do.

A second point: even if we are unusually good at self-knowledge, even if we do make every effort to correct for ego and vanity and self-protection, there is still nothing magic about knowledge-of-self that means we can be something impossible if we believe it fiercely enough. We can fantasize, but we can’t do magic. We can’t become the Chrysler building or a typhoon or a cheeseburger by thinking or believing.

Remember kids – most of the money goes right into Trump’s pocket.

As President Donald Trump seeks to discredit last week’s election with baseless claims of voter fraud, his team has bombarded his supporters with requests for money to help pay for legal challenges to the results: “The Left will try to STEAL this election!” reads one text.

But any small-dollar donations from Trump’s grassroots donors won’t be going to legal expenses at all, according to a Reuters review of the legal language in the solicitations.

A donor would have to give more than $8,000 before any money goes to the “recount account” established to finance election challenges, including recounts and lawsuits over alleged improprieties, the fundraising disclosures show.

Where does it go when it’s under 8 grand?

A large portion of the money goes to “Save America,” a Trump leadership PAC, or political action committee, set up on Monday, and the Republican National Committee (RNC). Under Federal Election Commission rules, both groups have broad leeway in how they can use the funds.

In other words it goes to a slush fund for Trump.

Leadership PACs such as Save America are often set up by prominent political figures to spend money on other candidates, while also paying for personal expenses, such as travel and hotel stays.

And we know Trump. He’ll be using it to pay for all his personal expenses.

Scrolling down the page would take a donor to the fine print, which shows that donations are split between “Save America,” which gets 60% of the money, and the RNC, which gets the other 40%. None of the money flows to Trump’s official “recount” committee fund until Trump’s Save America share reaches the legal contribution limit of $5,000, according to the disclosures.

That means that, before a dollar goes into the recount fund, Save America would receive $5,000 and the RNC around $3,300. Donations to the recount committee are legally limited to $2,800.

In short they’re promoting it for one thing but using it for another. This was already reported but I for one didn’t know that none of the money goes to the purported goal unless the donation is more than 8k.

Darrell Scott, an Ohio pastor who helped found the National Diversity Coalition for Trump and served on the president’s 2016 transition team, says he sees no problems with diverting the money to the leadership PAC or the RNC.

“I see this as two pockets on the same pair of pants. It doesn’t matter if it goes into the left or the right pocket,” Scott said. “In the end, the money will be used for a legitimate purpose that his supporters will get behind.”

The loose morals of the clergy; it’s a sad thing to see.

Bill Kristol’s view:

Dying days of a personality cult.