Lindsey Graham is another very bad man.

Tens of thousands of social media users joined a call for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s resignation on Tuesday, after the South Carolina Republican publicly offered advice to Donald Trump Jr. about his recent congressional subpoena.

The president’s eldest son was subpoenaed in April to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee about his contacts with Russia during the 2016 election, after twice backing out of planned testimony before the committee.

The subpoena prompted Graham—one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies—to tell Trump Jr. on Monday to refuse to answer the panel’s questions.

“You just show up and plead the Fifth and it’s over with,” Graham told reporters, according to The Washington Post.

Witness tampering anyone?

Lindsey Graham is a traitor. #LindseyGrahamResign https://t.co/CmpDISgqPB

— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) May 14, 2019

His project for today is trying to make it legal for Trump to imprison refugee children for five times longer than is legal now.

BREAKING: Lindsey Graham plans to introduce a bill that would increase the time Trump can detain refugee children from 20 days to 100. Absolutely ridiculous, un-American and disgusting. Just when you think Graham couldn’t get worse, here we are. Much worse. #LindseyGrahamResign

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) May 14, 2019

Yesterday Fresh Air was an interview with Phoebe Waller-Bridge who created and wrote “Fleabag.” There was one especially interesting bit…

GROSS: So you went to a Catholic school for girls. How did the sex segregation work for you? And was this – like, how old were you when you were in Catholic school.

WALLER-BRIDGE: I went there when I was 11. My mum had felt it was very important from day dot that we had boys around (laughter), as well as our brother. And – ’cause my brother had his sisters around the whole time. And we had him. But it’s something about actually socializing. And so mum was really, really good about making sure that we had boys and girls around the house. So I had a lot of, like, guy friends growing up because of that. But then I also really love the camaraderie of being around girls. And I still do. You know, I think that – there’s something very special about that feeling. But looking back, it does feel odd. The exclusivity of it is – does feel odd.

GROSS: So right before you went to Catholic school when you were 6 until you were around 10 – and correct me if this is wrong because this is just something I read – that you dressed as a boy. You shaved your head and called yourself Alex. Now, looking back on those years, do you understand why you wanted to do that?

WALLER-BRIDGE: Yeah. And I still have the same impulse all the time. I mean, I feel like when I was – I remember growing up up until I was about – when I was about 11, 12 was when I started dropping Alex, and I was Phoebe again. But I just thought they just had more fun. I just wanted to be out climbing the trees and wearing comfortable clothes. And, you know, it didn’t feel like it was for me. And a lot of my friends were really into the dresses and the dolls and all that kind of stuff. It just wasn’t my bag. And the only – and it just seemed so – you kind of had to choose one or the other at that time. And I just definitely wanted to be climbing the trees and that kind of thing. So I had a friend called Maria (ph). And we both had really short and, yeah, shaved it at one point and wore boxer shorts and swimming trunks. And we were just boys. I remember going into Gap once when I was about 7 and the guy coming up to me when I was with my mum and said, so what does the young man want? And I was like, yeah – convinced.

GROSS: (Laughter). Do you think if that was happening today that your parents would wonder if you were trans?

WALLER-BRIDGE: I think my parents would’ve been exactly the same. You know, and they never had an issue with it. They never – they were just sort of like, sure. You’re Alex. Let’s take you to Gap, Alex (laughter). And I just remember it never being a problem. I mean, there’s, you know, the tomboy kind of thing. I mean, I wonder now if I had back then – if I had – because I was very, very fervent about it when I was younger, as well. It was like I just desperately wanted to a boy more than anything else. If it had been taken seriously maybe by my school or something and I’d spoken about those options – those options had been given to me – I probably would’ve jumped at it. But I don’t think my parents would’ve been any different. I think they’re just like, live and let live. And so I was very, very happy being a girl dressed as a boy as long as I was allowed to express myself that way and allowed to change my name and stuff. They were like, yeah, whatever makes you happy.

GROSS: So…

WALLER-BRIDGE: And then one day, I turn up, and I’m like, I’m Phoebe now. And they were like, welcome home (laughter).

And…is it fair to say that’s better? Is it fair to say it’s better to be relaxed about it that way and see what shakes out instead of going straight to the trans option at age 7 or 10 or 15? Is it fair to say it’s better, other things being equal, to reach adulthood without hormone treatments and/or surgery? To let your body do what it’s going to do?

GROSS: What made you change? When you went back to Phoebe, were you also changing the way you dressed? ‘Cause The nice thing about when you’re a girl or a woman – you can still wear a man’s clothes. And, you know, ’cause what are there? There are pants and jackets and shirts, you know, and T-shirts.

WALLER-BRIDGE: Yeah.

GROSS: They’re just kind of standard. When a man wears a dress, that’s making much more of a major statement than when a woman wears, like, jeans and a T-shirt, which both genders wear.

They do now, but fifty or sixty years ago a woman wearing jeans was still seen as a major statement, and twenty or thirty years before that even more so. It took a long time before that became unremarkable enough that girls could wear jeans to school and women could wear trousers at work.

Is Trump hoping to start a war with Iran?

DoJ investigating Trump’s opponents. A European neo-fascist getting red carpet treatment in Oval. War plans for Iran. All out trade war with China. These are all things happening right now.

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) May 14, 2019

Are they working on the pretext even now? There’s a hole in a Norwegian oil tanker anchored off the UAE.

The damage appeared relatively minor, and no one has been officially blamed.

And yet, there are growing fears that this mysterious, obscure incident could become a catalyst — accidental or otherwise — that inflames the already knife-edge tensions between the United States and Iran.

Or, rather, between Trump and those scary Mooooslim guys over there in the hot place.

Since his election in 2016, President Donald Trump and his team have consistently taken a more hawkish stance toward [Iran] than the Obama administration.

The president withdrew from a landmark deal designed to curb Iran’s nuclear program last year. Trump complained that, although Iran was complying, the agreement was too soft.

Then the U.S. deployed an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf last week to counter alleged threats from Tehran.

And then settled down to wait. It didn’t take long.

What worries some experts in Europe is the bellicose rhetoric being exchanged between the U.S. and Iran.

Never mind who was behind Sunday’s attack, it is the mere uncertainty surrounding it, combined with the warlike words exchanged by both sides, that escalates the risk for some misunderstanding leading to war, so this theory goes.

“Regardless of whether these ships got hit by Iranians or not, the Americans and the Iranians have gotten themselves into this cycle where neither seems to be able to back down from making belligerent statements,” according to Michael Stephens, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.

The tough talk employed by Trump, Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton carries significant and perhaps unintended and unforeseen risks, Stephens said.

Or perhaps intended and foreseen and hotly desired.

As the New Yorker magazine pointed out Monday, the U.S. does have “a long history of provoking, instigating, or launching wars based on dubious, flimsy, or manufactured threats.”

Perhaps the most famous of these were the disputed Gulf of Tonkin attacks in 1964 that led to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Disputed? I think the correct word there is “wholly discredited.”

War with Iran would not be a good thing.

Rosenstein is dropping the mask.

Former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein on Monday defended his role in the firing of James B. Comey from the FBI and criticized the bureau’s former director as a “partisan pundit” — offering one of his most detailed public accounts of the hectic events that led to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel.

Partisan? Partisan in what sense? Comey was a lifelong Republican until Trump and the Republican enablers of Trump turned him off that party without turning him on to the other one. It can’t be called “partisan” for Republicans or conservatives to be disgusted by Trump and the party loyalty to Trump. Trump is a bad man, and that’s not a “partisan” issue. Harvey Weinstein supported Democrats; that doesn’t make me see Harvey Weinstein as not a bad man.

In prepared remarks, Rosenstein seemed to minimize the effect Comey’s firing could have had on the inquiry. He said that when a White House lawyer first told him Trump had decided to fire Comey, “Nobody said that the removal was intended to influence the course of my Russia investigation.”

Well they wouldn’t tell him that, would they. “Hi, Rod, the president has decided to fire Comey to fuck with your Russia investigation”; no, they wouldn’t have said that. Is that his alibi? It seems weak.

“I would never have allowed anyone to interfere with the investigation,” he asserted, though he conceded later that he “recognized that the unusual circumstances of the firing and the ensuing developments would give reasonable people cause to speculate about the credibility of the investigation.”

Ya think?

Rosenstein made clear, too, that he has been distressed by Comey’s recent commentary about him. He referred to a New York Times op-ed in which Comey suggested that Rosenstein and Attorney General William P. Barr had allowed their souls to be consumed by Trump.

“But now the former director is a partisan pundit, selling books and earning speaking fees while speculating about the strength of my character and the fate of my immortal soul,” Rosenstein said. “That is disappointing. Speculating about souls is not a job for police and prosecutors.”

Oh stop. Talk of selling the soul is a metaphor. and Comey’s disgust at Trump is not partisan. Talk about “disappointing”…

So now the Supreme Court might reverse Brown, too? Seriously?

Since April 2018, more than two dozen executive and judicial nominees have declined to endorse the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This week — one that marks the 65th anniversary of the landmark ruling that struck down legal apartheid in this country — the Senate is poised to confirm three of those judicial nominees to lifetime seats on the federal bench.

That is simply unacceptable.

I’ll say. It’s horrifying.

For nearly 65 years, the legal consensus around Brown was unequivocal. With its transformational opinion eviscerating segregation and codifying the modern contours of equal justice, Brown remained above partisanship, ideology and everything else.

Even the most conservative judges affirmed its centrality to our nation’s democratic character. At his 2005 confirmation hearing, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. repeatedly affirmed his agreement with Brown. That same year, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. explained that Brown “vindicated what the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment was supposed to mean, which was to guarantee equal rights to people of all races.” Just last year, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh described Brown as the “single greatest moment in Supreme Court history.”

But in April 2018, Trump judicial nominee Wendy Vitter bucked more than a half-century of unanimity by failing to offer support for the Brown decision. In response to Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (D-Conn.) request for her position, Vitter said, “I don’t mean to be coy, but I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions, which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with.” Judicial nominees such as Andrew Oldham, Neomi Rao and Michael Park followed Vitter’s lead.

Why are they doing this?

The ugly truth is that declining to offer approval of Brown signals a willingness to question the project of democracy that Brown created — one in which African Americans and other marginalized groups compelled the federal courts to honor the spirit of equal justice embodied in the words of the 14th Amendment. And this isn’t just deeply troubling; it’s also downright dangerous.

Damn right.

The author of the piece, Sherrilyn Ifill, is president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Pakistani authorities have a word with Twitter.

Twitter’s formally informed me Pakistani authorities notified them that the above violates Pakistan’s blasphemy law. Punishment for this in Pakistan is death. I’m Pakistani origin & visit family there. Twitter has a moral duty to tell me who precisely is trying to have me killed pic.twitter.com/OiyZh2hQy4

— Maajid – (Mājid) [maːʤɪd] ماجد (@MaajidNawaz) May 12, 2019

You know, the US, or Mississippi, or Little Rock could pass a law saying nobody is allowed to criticize the US. Such a law would not pass judicial review, but supposing for the sake of argument that it did – would that mean that people in Pakistan or Mexico or Somalia have to obey that law? Of course not. There’s such a thing as jurisdiction. The laws of one country don’t extend to the people of all other countries. In other words, who cares that some goons in Pakistan claim that that friendly panel of Jesus and Mo saying howdy “is in violation of Pakistan law”? Why does Twitter bother passing that on?

Indeed, indicating even more perhaps that someone is manually going through old tweets to hunt people down

— Maajid – (Mājid) [maːʤɪd] ماجد (@MaajidNawaz) May 13, 2019

The heresy-sniffers are everywhere.

This crap again.

Scarlett Moffatt and Jodie Whitaker lead worst dressed on #BAFTATV red carpet https://t.co/NuFa4jdkXE pic.twitter.com/edfFYRFOND

— Mirror Celeb (@MirrorCeleb) May 12, 2019

The article is just a string of photos like that and the “reporter,” James Brinsford, saying why he doesn’t like each dress.

Note the ratio.

The replies are uniformly hostile.

People are so weird – sitting down in cold blood to put together a thing like this that is nothing but  bullying intended to make people feel bad – women, specifically. They go to an event, they dress up the way they have to, they pose obligingly for photos, wearing their biggest smiles – and along comes ratbag to say they all look like crap. Meanness for the sake of it.

We need to stop.

Whoa, top class DARVO from the Trump gang!

The White House on Sunday decried Democratic-led congressional investigations, saying Democrats are refusing to abide by “rules and norms” that govern oversight authority as they issue subpoenas for documents the Trump administration refuses to hand over.

We’re not refusing to abide by “rules and norms,” you’re refusing to abide by “rules and norms.” So there!

“There are rules and norms governing congressional oversight of the executive branch, and the Democrats simply refuse to abide by them,” White House deputy press secretary Steve Groves said in a statement. “Democrats are demanding documents they know they have no legal right to see — including confidential communications between the President and foreign leaders and grand jury information that cannot be disclosed under the law.”

…

Last week, President Donald Trump invoked blanket executive privilege over special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report, preventing the House Judiciary Committee — which had previously subpoenaed the Justice Department for a full, underacted version of the report — from obtaining it.

Earlier Sunday, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff criticized the President’s move, saying on ABC’s “This Week” that there’s no basis for Trump using executive privilege to keep Democrats from obtaining the full report.

“But here, the Trump administration has decided to say a blanket no; no to any kind of oversight whatsoever, no witnesses, no documents, no nothing, claiming executive privilege over things that it knows there is no basis for,” he said.

No you did.

Jesse Singal on the Ban Scholars move:

2/ less faith that, as a journalist who often writes about science, I will be able to continue using Twitter without getting punished for communicating scientifiically accurate infromation. Twitter is making a terrible and embarrassing error here that it should fix.

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 12, 2019

4/This is how you get the most important outlet in the world running an extremely misleading column on testosterone, the ACLU arguing women can compete w/and beat men in competitive sports. etc.

We're approaching a Soviet/fundamentalist/take your pick level of science denialism. pic.twitter.com/SJ6ia3NvLe

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 12, 2019

6/ In conclusion , Twitter, PLEASE suspend me for accurately citing the DSM. I am begging you. It would give me the perfect excuse to stay off this site and I will have too much pride and ego to delete my accurate tweets.

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 12, 2019

Ok let’s talk about that.

https://twitter.com/MitchBenn/status/1127226655926304768

What does it mean to say “transgenderism is an actual thing”?

It’s an actual thing in the sense that people talk about it a lot, but that’s not what Benn means, because he contrasts it with “transethnicism” which as far as we know, according to him, is not an actual thing.

So what does he mean? Presumably something like “an actual condition, not just a fashion or fad or subject of conversation.” But then how does he know it really is an actual condition, not just a fashion or fad or subject of conversation? Is his knowledge derived from the noisy shouting about it on Twitter? But that can’t be a good reason. Twitter shouting can’t be the criterion for distinguishing between an actual condition (physical? psychological?) and a fad.

And what part of transgenderism is the actual thing? Is it the feelings in the head, or is it the presentation of self? Is it dysphoria or is it a frilly little dress and red silk shoes?

And what makes that an actual thing while ruling out “transethnicism” as an actual thing? How can we know that?

I keep wondering where people get their confident knowledge on this subject when it’s all so…conceptual.

Nick Cohen writes that Britain is too fond of “characters” to call a far-right politician a far-right politician.

If you want to deceive the French public, you pose as an intellectual. In England, you pose as a character. Like a criminal on a witness protection programme, the ham actor who plays upper-class roles avoids the accountability that prevents democratic life degenerating into the feast of fools we see around us.

In the US you pose as a nice guy. (Women of course don’t get to play this game.) Joe Biden is recycling himself yet again because of all those cozy photos of him with Obama. Joe Biden is not a nice guy.

They get away with it because the old British ruling class never quite discredited itself. Every other major European country was ruled by fascists and communists in the 20th century and suffered occupation and collaboration. In Britain, it is still possible to adopt the mannerisms of the old elite and not be treated with the scorn and incomprehension a modern caricature of a Prussian general would receive in contemporary Germany.

So a Downton Abbey runs for centuries.

Britain’s privileged history explains the denial in part. We are a moderate island, runs the national myth, extremism happens over the water and far away. But the refusal to tear the masks away matters more. I have never seen a television broadcaster hold Farage to account for his blatant misrepresentations of the consequences of no deal.

The BBC could barely bring itself to cover his and his financial backers’ links to the Russian embassy. Journalists call Johnson “Boris”, as if he were a pal entitled to mates’ rates they would never grant a stranger. And when Eddie Mair, then of the BBC, did his job and subjected him to a tough interview in 2017, what would have been a routine occurrence in a healthy democracy caused a sensation.

Every slippery politician is looking for the same chummy consideration. Supporters of the Labour leader are trying to establish him as “Jeremy” rather than “Corbyn” or “Mr Corbyn”, to quote the most egregious example. Politicians become journalists and journalists become politicians, as the firewalls of democracy burn down. You don’t have to be famous to enjoy protection. Claire Fox, of Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, is inevitably one of the most immoral people in public life. She and her Revolutionary Communist party sect have covered up war crimes against Bosnian Muslims, justified IRA murders of civilians and defended child porn. Only when she stood for Farage’s party this month did most voters learn of her dark past. Why was it never mentioned in her hundreds of appearances on the BBC? The question answers itself. The BBC will not apply the same standards to its “talent” as it applies to others.

But hey, she’s probably never told a man he’s not a lesbian.

They have got to be kidding.

Ray Blanchard served on the gender dysphoria working group and chaired the paraphilia working group for DSM V. He is a world expert in the field. Twitter has just suspended his account for a thread setting out his findings from
A lifetime of research. Unreal pic.twitter.com/vgQCd4OzYs

— Helen Joyce (@HJJoyceEcon) May 12, 2019

Andrew Gilligan in the Sunday Times:

People warned by the police over comments they made about transgender issues are launching a pressure group and legal action next week, challenging “Big Brother interference” with their free speech rights.

The Fair Cop campaign is headed by Harry Miller, 54, from Lincolnshire, who was visited at work in January by Humberside police for retweeting a limerick that said trans women had silicone breasts. The force admitted there was no crime, but described it as a “hate incident” and said it would be monitoring Miller’s and his wife’s social media accounts.

Others involved include the Father Ted writer Graham Linehan, who was given a police warning after getting into a row with a trans activist on Twitter; the journalist Caroline Farrow, who was threatened with an interview under caution for “misgendering” a trans person; and Kate Scottow, who was arrested in front of her children and held in a cell for seven hours after referring to a transgender woman as a man.

Police telling people that men are women and it’s a crime to deny it. I know I keep saying this but isn’t it funny how women have never had this level of police concern over actual threats and sustained abuse, while now mere “misgendering” merits an interview under caution.

The force defended its action against Miller as “proportionate” and said it had spoken to him after being passed “more than 30 tweets of a transphobic nature, not just a liked or retweeted limerick”. These included tweets saying that trans women were not women.

See that’s the thing. The police are using the Woke-Twitter definition of “transphobia,” which includes Wrong Pronouns and statements of fact such as “men are not women” and “men can’t be lesbians.” That’s…not phobic.

[For US readers – a “fair cop” is a legit collar; often followed by “guvnor.”]

They don’t think these things through at all, do they.

Temporary provisional acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney did an interview for CBS news the other day.

Of particular interest, though, was the exchange that began at the 23:12 mark of the conversation.

The host noted that the Treasury Department has refused a congressional order to turn over Donald Trump’s tax returns, and Garrett asked why. This was the exchange that followed:

MULVANEY: Because they are not entitled to see them by law. By the way, they know, especially on this one, they know they’re never going to get these documents. This is a pure show-pony-type of situation. They know the legal reasons they can get those documents –

GARRETT: Legitimate legislative function.

MULVANEY: Right. And they’re not even close to that… They’re just doing this to make the president look bad. They don’t care. This is not about information about the president. Keep in mind, all of the president’s financial holdings, by law, are disclosed. Want to know what the president owns? Want to know how he makes money? All of that stuff is, by law, I have to fill out my form by the end of next week. So does he. This is just about trying to embarrass the president.

GARRETT: What’s embarrassing about his tax records?

MULVANEY: That’s what they want to know.

Oops. Don’t they plan ahead at all? Don’t they come up with an explanation for why Trump is hiding his tax returns that doesn’t imply he knows they’ll document what a crook he is?