At least Donnie and Volodya are still buddies. That’s a comfort.

President Trump spoke with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin by phone for more than an hour Friday about topics including the outcome of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, the White House said.

How sweet.

The two touched “very, very briefly” on Mueller’s findings, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters.

“It was discussed, essentially in the context that it’s over, and there was no collusion, which I’m pretty sure both leaders were very well aware of long before this call took place,” Sanders told reporters at the White House.

But was there Russian interference? Oooooooh let’s not talk about that.

Trump later tweeted about the call, referring to the Muller investigation as the “Russian Hoax.”

“As I have always said, long before the Witch Hunt started, getting along with Russia, China, and everyone is a good thing, not a bad thing,” he wrote. “We discussed Trade, Venezuela, Ukraine, North Korea, Nuclear Arms Control and even the ‘Russian Hoax.’ Very productive talk!”

What about getting along with Venezuela? Cuba? Iran? Is that a good thing, not a bad thing? Do they count as “and everyone”?

Next up is David Frum.

I feel that these two sentences from Volume II of the Mueller report have not gotten anything like the attention they deserve (My retyping; my highlighting) pic.twitter.com/DfXAlmiftS

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 3, 2019

“But the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover” – not might uncover, please note, but would uncover – “facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes…”

They were crimes outside the scope of his inquiry, but a thorough FBI probe would find them.

Interesting.

Oh but surely there’s no law against an Attorney General of the US lying to Congress under oath.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Thursday that the US attorney general, William Barr, committed a “crime” when he told lawmakers during a congressional hearing last month that he was unaware that special counsel Robert Mueller was unhappy with his portrayal of the findings from his investigation into Russian meddling.

“What’s deadly serious about it is the attorney general of the United States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States,” Pelosi said on Thursday morning during her weekly press conference with reporters. “And that’s a crime.”

Mimi Rocah agrees, sort of:

…Barr has over and over during this process deceived the American public. Mueller reportedly told Barr he should release his executive summaries to the public, which makes sense given that these summaries contain almost no redactions — clearly they were written so they could be widely distributed and read. After Mueller said this, however, Barr testified before Congress. He could have used this opportunity to be honest about the differences in opinion between himself and the special counsel. Instead he said nothing. In fact, he went one step further and misled Congress and the American people.

When asked by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., if Mueller supported his conclusion, Barr replied, “I don’t know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion.”

But he did know. He knew that Mueller felt his report was not being properly contextualized and wanted more information to be released so that voters and lawmakers could make their own determinations on several questions not definitively answered by the report — especially whether or not the president had obstructed justice. Prosecutors can debate if this fits within the exacting requirements of the statute used to prosecute false statements made under oath to Congress, 18 USC Section 1001 — or whether Barr, a savvy lawyer, walked the line just enough to avoid breaking the law.

But that cannot be the standard for an attorney general of the United States. We should expect and demand objectively, neutrality, honesty and integrity from our top law enforcement official.

It’s debatable whether he committed a crime or not, but why should we grin obediently and accept an Attorney General who just barely didn’t quite break the law but is lying to us in service to a crooked filthy sadist masquerading as a president? Why should we?

Say what now?

The terms on the right are interesting, in that this is the sort of language you would expect to be used by robots or space aliens who had absolutely no cultural understanding of real-life human mothers… er, I mean, gesto-lactational uterine-supply humanoids. pic.twitter.com/YzDY0rSc21

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) May 2, 2019

Where is this??

Ah.

Source:https://t.co/mN0wmpi2Tm

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) May 2, 2019

Ok so I’m reading the Ledge Bit Kyooeea Inclooosiv Pregnancy n Birth Care post.

Pregnancy and birth care professionals fulfill a wide range of roles and functions in the lives of the people and families we serve. However, as a whole, our goal is to provide compassionate, respectful, culturally appropriate care to all of our clients.

I hope they spare a little attention for the medical aspect of the whole thing.

Most of the resources available to birthworkers are not centered on the lived experience, identity, and needs of people whose gender identity and sexual orientation fall outside of heteronormative mainstream definitions of sex and gender.

What are these “needs” though? Lesbians probably don’t want to be asked questions about their husbands, but surely that’s not all that difficult to manage with notes on the chart or similar, unless the setting is some churchy hospital in the boondocks. It doesn’t seem to require a vast amount of “centering”; just a little would do. Other than that…what? The fact that some pregnant women say they are men? Put another note on the chart and move on.

1. ASK, DON’T ASSUME!
Just because someone “looks like” a particular gender doesn’t mean they identify that way. Ask them what name and pronoun they use, note their name and pronouns on intake and medical history forms—and use them consistently.

But…how? How do you use third person pronouns in two person interactions? You don’t. Also…if it annoys or upsets a trans person not to be asked what pronouns They use, might it upset a person who is not trans to be asked? Might it upset or annoy almost everyone who is asked? Is that something to take into account at all? Are there some contexts in which it actually is better to assume than to ask? Think, for instance, of people who are asked “Where are you from?” when they’re not immigrants but are, say, browner than the majority. Asking what the pregnant woman’s pronouns are could feel like that.

Many (but not all!) LGBTQIA people have complicated relationships with their body. Asking them what terms they use for their body and/or body parts, and then using those terms, can help them feel empowered and affirmed.

Hmmmm. So one person calls her Birth Entryway “Muffy” and another calls it “Love Canal” and another calls it “James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree” – won’t it get a little tricky for the birth care professionals to remember them all?

I see a future in which all the birth professionals are in a huddle trying to remember which name they’re supposed to apply to this particular Birth Entryway while the baby just makes its own way out.

CNN says it’s all over, Barr has done what he was hired to do and protected President Mob Boss for the next year and a half. David Leonhardt at the Times says Mueller blew it.

It’s now clear that he mishandled the end of the Russia investigation.

Mueller naively trusted that William Barr, the attorney general, would act honorably and patriotically, as well, and let Barr decide how to handle the initial release of Mueller’s report. Barr, of course, wrote a letter that misled the public about what was in the report, creating a perception that the investigation cleared President Trump.

“For 27 days, the debate over Mueller’s findings was twisted by Barr’s poisonous distortions that implied a full exoneration of President Trump,” as The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne wrote yesterday. Mueller himself has since complained to Barr about the letter.

And Barr doesn’t give a shit, because he got what he wanted to get.

What could Mueller have done differently? He could have recognized that Barr wasn’t trustworthy, given that Trump had nominated him for the attorney general job largely because Barr had expressed hostility to Mueller’s investigation. Mueller could then have acted accordingly.

He could have insisted that Barr release a summary written by Mueller and his team. Mueller may not have had the statutory power to insist on such a release, but he did have the actual power. If Barr had refused, Mueller could have made clear that his own summary would leak to the press, in short order.

But he didn’t.

Barr and the Trump administration have staked out the legal position that anything that rankles the president — congressional oversight, press coverage, the Mueller investigation itself — is illegitimate, writes Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. “It’s Nixonian in scope to imply that anything Trump wants to do in order to push back against the media and protect his reputation is legal and justified,” she writes.

Neal Katyal, who wrote the special counsel regulations, offers a more optimistic take in The Times. He argues that Barr’s failure to defend his spin under congressional questioning is evidence that the system is working. “Barr’s deeply evasive testimony on Wednesday necessitates and tees up a full investigation in Congress,” Katyal writes.

I hope the reality is more Katyal than Barr.

This happened yesterday:

Tonight I’m going to retweet all the abuse I get for calling out misogyny on twitter today in @HumanRightsCtte. It will be instructive. So fasten your seat belts we’re in for a bumpy ride #onlineabuse https://t.co/WPRFo1rSVz

— Joanna Cherry QC MP (@joannaccherry) May 1, 2019

And another https://t.co/bx38b9bY04

— Joanna Cherry QC MP (@joannaccherry) May 1, 2019

And another one https://t.co/bx38b9bY04

— Joanna Cherry QC MP (@joannaccherry) May 1, 2019

It got boring fast.

Ok 20 minutes of that was enough. Off for a G&T. Thanks to all the wonderful women & men who have sent me msgs of thanks or support today. They far outweigh the abusers. I believe in #FreeSpeech & respectful debate. That’s all #onlineabuse @HumanRightsCtte https://t.co/T3mTMl7UVc

— Joanna Cherry QC MP (@joannaccherry) May 1, 2019

James Kirkup wrote about it at the Spectator today. Twitter is not real life, he notes, but it does shape the discourse, so it does matter.

So when Twitter starts denying a voice and a platform to certain people and certain ideas, that matters. It also matters when Twitter makes it possible for certain people with certain ideas to be violently abused for expressing those ideas.

Twitter matters in the debate about sex and gender because, at a time when some media outlets and some political representatives are a bit reluctant to engage in a full, rounded debate, Twitter is for some people the only place to talk. So it really matters when Twitter allows the nasty intimidation of women who express views that some people don’t like. And it really matters when Twitter bans from its platform women who express such views – or just state facts that some people find inconvenient.

Both of those things are happening, and happening routinely. Nasty abuse of women who question the mantra that ‘trans women are women’ – or simply ask questions about the implications for law and policy of that stance – is commonplace, with grim consequences.

He cites Helen Lewis, and the fact that she doesn’t join the Twitter conversation as much as she might because of

the abuse and threats she receives there from pathetic, cowardly men claiming to promote the interests of transgender people. Abuse and threats that Twitter appears content to tolerate.

Like for instance yesterday:

UPDATE: This tweet is officially not abusive. Thanks, Twitter. I will try to view it “in the context of a larger conversation” whatever the hell that means. pic.twitter.com/4ZBx6rB2Qv

— Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) April 29, 2019

Yes, certainly, telling a woman – a woman who talks and writes as a profession, a woman who is good enough for The New Statesman and the Atlantic and Saturday Review – to shut the fuck up, from behind a pointed gun, is all part of the “conversation.”

Kirkup goes on:

Yet elsewhere, Twitter takes a very different approach to what it permits to be said on its platform. Among women who question transgender ideology, an experience almost as common as being abused online is being banned from Twitter for saying things some men don’t like. I could write a very, very long article listing all the women who have been barred from a media platform (that turns a blind eye to threats of violence) simply for stating facts. Facts like ‘men are more likely to commit crimes of violence than women’ and ‘in English law, a rapist must be male because rape is defined as inserting your penis into another person’s body without consent’.

He says to check out #TwitterHatesWomen for more examples than anyone could possibly want.

And because Twitter, sadly, matters, this stuff needs to be debated and scrutinised. Which is why this article isn’t really about Twitter and its awfulness, but about a politician who has done something rather wonderful.

That politician is Joanna Cherry QC, an SNP MP and member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. It was at that committee that Cherry recently said ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ a lot, and in so doing did her job as a parliamentarian in an arena where many others have failed.

The context was a hearing where a Twitter representative was giving evidence about the site’s role in the intimidation of politicians.

You can watch the whole thing here, and I recommend that you do.

I plan to.See

The Twitter representative still does not get it though…or pretends not to. Watch the clip:

Never seen Parliament so sweary before. SNP's @joannaccherry interrogates Twitter exec on precisely when it's acceptable to use the C-word online. pic.twitter.com/wLIlU8YKJl

— Hugo Gye (@HugoGye) May 1, 2019

Joanna Cherry: “Do you accept that the word TERF is a gendered term, forgive me, in the same way as bitch and cunt are gendered terms?”

Twitter’s Katy Minshall: “Yes.”

Cherry: “And are bitch and cunt acceptable on Twitter?”

Minshall: “We don’t have a prohibition on swearing…”

BZZZZZZZZZZZT. Wrong. The issue is not swearing, the issue is gendered epithets.

I do wish people could manage to hang on to that thought for longer than five seconds.

A city of ten million people is rapidly sinking, which is a little worrying since it’s a coastal city.

THIS WEEK, AMID devastating flooding, Indonesia announced it’s planning to move its capital out of Jakarta, which really is nothing new—the country’s first president was talking about it way back in 1957. Part of the problem is extreme congestion, but today the city of more than 10 million is facing nothing short of obliteration by rising seas and sinking land, two opposing yet complementary forces of doom. Models predict that by 2050, 95 percent of North Jakarta could be submerged. And Jakarta is far from alone—cities the world over are drowning and sinking, and there’s very little we can do about it short of stopping climate change entirely.

Bombay? New York? Tokyo? Shanghai? Miami?

Jakarta’s situation may be particularly dire, but it isn’t the only coastal metropolis that’s sinking. “Almost every coastal city around the world builds on loose sediment, and all of them are subsiding, regardless of pumping groundwater,” says Arizona State University geophysicist Manoochehr Shirzaei, who studies land subsidence. “In fact, vertical land motion is as important as sea level rise, but unfortunately it gets very little attention, because the process is slow.”

…

That’s an inevitable consequence of building on landfill, but Jakarta has the power to cut back on the groundwater pumping that’s the root of the crisis. Except, even that won’t save the day. “This has been happening for so long, that when you remove water from the ground the porous structure collapses,” says University of Oregon earth scientist Estelle Chaussard, who’s studied land subsidence in Jakarta. “The problem is that a large amount of this subsidence, and this decrease in porous storage of the aquifer, is irreversible.” Not only that, layers of the porous earth will keep deforming even if you stop pumping groundwater, potentially causing further subsidence, though at least a smaller amount of it.

Even if Jakarta could stop land subsidence, it’s still sitting on the edge of the sea, and seas are rising. The city has already deployed a network of canals and seawalls to stave off the threat, but with climate change the threat will only grow worse.

The rich will escape and the poor will drown. Oh and by the way Jakarta is running out of drinking water, with no good solution available.

Barr says he has a headache.

Attorney General William Barr is no longer expected to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, the committee’s chairman Jerry Nadler announced, following a dispute between House Democrats and the nation’s top law enforcement officer over whether Barr would publicly face questions from committee staff.

In comments to reporters on Capitol Hill, Nadler also said the Justice Department told the committee it would not comply with its subpoena for the full, unredacted report from special counsel Robert Mueller, a subpoena which had a deadline of Wednesday to comply.

So much for an independent Department of Justice.

Gee…that certainly sounds like a president who is above the law.

Wild from Barr: If the president feels a proceeding is unfounded, "the president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate the proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused." pic.twitter.com/SMpiIXia92

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 1, 2019

Barr is continuing to reveal what a wholly owned subsidiary he is.

Attorney General William Barr told senators today that he is not in the business of determining when lies are told to the American people.

The remark came after Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, cited evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report about President Trump’s interactions with White House Counsel Don McGahn and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Here’s that exchange:

Blumenthal: “The Mueller report establishes that quote substantial evidence supports the conclusion that the President, in fact, directed McGahn to call Rosenstein to have the special counsel removed. That’s in volume 2, page 88. In your view, did President Trump on those occasions and others recited in the report lie to the American people?”

Barr: “I’m not in the business of determining when lies are told to the American people. I’m in the business of determining whether a crime has been committed.”

Then he pretended he’d forgotten.

Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers he does not recall discussing any investigations that stemmed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe with the White House.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, pressed Barr about his discussions with the White House.

…

Barr: “By the way I’m not sure, you know, the laundry list of investigations, but I certainly haven’t talked the substance or been directed to do anything on any of the cases.”

Blumenthal: “Well let me give you an opportunity to clarify. Have you had any conversations with anyone in the White House about those ongoing investigations that were spawned or spun off by–“

Barr: “I don’t recall having any substantive discussion on the investigations– “

Then Kamala Harris asked him some questions.

Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democratic presidential candidate, accused Attorney General William Barr of failing to look at evidence before making a decision on obstruction of justice.

Harris grilled Barr on statements he made in his March 24 summary, saying he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had looked at the evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report before reaching their decision on obstruction of justice. In his letter, Barr said he found the evidence was not sufficient to establish that the President committed obstruction of justice.

But Harris questioned whether Barr had personally reviewed the special counsel’s “great deal of evidence.”

She then asked, “My question is in reaching your conclusion, did you personally review all of the underlying evidence?”

Barr responded, “No,” adding that he “accepted the statements in the report as the factual record.”

Here’s a portion of Harris’ questioning:

Harris: “As the attorney general of the United States, you run the United States Department of Justice. If in any US attorney’s office around the country, the head of that office, when being asked to make a critical decision about, in this case, the person who holds the highest office in the land, and whether or not that person committed a crime, would you accept them recommending a charging decision to you if they had not reviewed the evidence?”

Barr: “Well, that’s a question for Bob Mueller. He’s the US attorney. He’s the one who presents the report.”

Harris: “But it was you who made the charging decision, sir.”

He dodged some more and she pressed some more.

Harris: “I think you’ve made it clear that you have not looked at the evidence. We can move on. I think you’ve made it clear sir that you’ve not looked at the evidence, and we can move on.”

He’s made it clear that the fix is in.

Originally a comment by latsot in the Miscellany Room.

UK police forces are increasingly demanding that victims of rape and sexual assault hand over their phones and account details under the threat of their cases being dropped if they don’t.

Let’s be entirely clear about this. Someone making an accusation of rape (or any other crime) has a certain burden of evidence. For example, she might have to produce evidence that she was in the same place as the alleged rapist at the same time. In this case, she might choose to allow police to access the location data from her phone service or the police might obtain a warrant to perform a time/location limited search regardless of permission. Even I – a known privacy tinhat – wouldn’t object to that if I were seeking to prosecute and I doubt I’d consider it a violation if it were a known and routine part of any investigation of that sort.

But there might be other sources of the same evidence such as CCTV or witness accounts. Surely the intent is to establish opportunity. If phone location is needed for that, then it ought to be provided at the victim’s discretion, not demanded in advance alongside everything else that’s on her phone before an investigation can even begin.

An accused rapist might claim texts or social media exchanges as exonerating or mitigating circumstances. In that case, it would surely be his responsibility to produce the relevant material and not the victim’s responsibility to hand over her phone. Confronted with these claims, she might or might not agree to disclose some data knowing that it might hurt her case if she doesn’t. But in that case, the police could specify exactly what data was required. For example, social media posts within a timeframe or involving a particular third party. There would be no need for her to hand over her phone for this purpose.

There have been many, many cases of police the world over stealing intimate photographs from people’s phones and sharing them with colleagues, friends and the internet at large. There have also been many cases of police unearthing something dodgy about a victim unrelated to the case at hand and that case disappearing because of it. There are also many, many, many, many cases of women being judged because of the things they say, the things they wear, the photographs they have on their phone and – let’s face it – literally everything else. There’s an equal if not greater number of cases where women have been humiliated in court because of the judgements prosecutors believe (presumably rightly in enough cases to make it worthwhile) that juries will make about them.

This is, of course, another tactic to deter women from reporting rape. It’s also a tactic by police to collect as much information about everyone on the planet as possible without any guarantees that the data will be safeguarded, deleted when no longer required and not shared at large on the internet.

As Privacy International has reported, the UK police don’t even have the proper guidelines to deal with the contents of anyone’s phone, let alone actual rules or procedures or any departments equipped to enforce them.

This could not be more obviously calculated to persuade women to drop charges of rape and sexual assault.

And the wider implication is that in time anyone who makes any kind of complaint against anybody at all must have led a blameless life or be afraid to seek justice of any kind.

We British are so easily whipped up into fascist sentiment. What in screaming fuck is wrong with us? That is not a rhetorical question.

What we’re watching right now is the top legal official in the US bending all his expertise and establishment cred (which he has a lot more of than Jeff Sessions ever did) to protect a malevolent unhinged criminal and make sure he (said criminal) gets to stay in the job where he can kill us all and destroy most of the planet.

Chris Cillizza notes that Barr lied to Congress about Mueller’s view of Barr’s summary:

Mueller sent a letter to Barr on March 27 expressing concern about the ways in which Barr’s summary document described the evidence surrounding obstructive behavior. Mueller did not make issue with any of the factual statements in Barr’s four-page letter but rather the lack of nuance on obstruction — and the resultant media coverage, according to CNN’s Laura Jarrett’s reporting.

That revelation creates a series of problems for Barr — most notably that he appeared to be, at best, misleading in his answers about Mueller’s feelings about his summary of the report.

On April 9, in a House hearing, Barr seemed entirely unaware of Mueller’s issues with his summary report. Here’s the key exchange between Barr and Florida Democratic Rep. Charlie Crist:

CRIST: Reports have emerged recently, general, that members of the special counsel’s team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24 letter, that it does not adequately or accurately portray the report’s findings. Do you know what they are referencing with that?

BARR: No, I don’t.

He did though.

Cillizza goes on to say that Barr gave himself room to say he wasn’t technically lying – but who cares? He shouldn’t be playing games like that to shore up this criminal lunatic we’re dealing with. No one should.

From the Barr hearing:

Lindsey Graham is reading quotes from FBI officials saying anti-Trump things in 2016 … much like the anti-Trump things Graham was saying in 2016. "I think Donald Trump is a con man,” he said then.

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) May 1, 2019

Brian Williams just broke into @MSNBC's coverage of the Barr hearing to correct Lindsey Graham: "The chairman of the Judiciary Committee just said that Mueller found there is no collusion. That is not correct."

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 1, 2019

There may not be a member of this Administration with more to answer for than the Attorney General.

His confirmation occurred only a few months ago. Yet in that short time, Barr’s conduct has raised damning questions about his impartiality and fitness. https://t.co/TzjWCEFt2d

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) May 1, 2019

Barr says that the reason Mueller was unhappy with his memo was due to the way it was being covered in the media and in public, not because of the contents of the memo itself. Mueller's letter just released completely contradicts this assessment by Barr. #BarrHearing pic.twitter.com/9FTX4yTRI9

— Real Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) May 1, 2019

Yes, that’s not what the letter says.

According to Barr, presidents can now order WH lawyers to change their testimony to federal investigators in order to state things that are factually false and its not obstruction or suborning perjury. Future WH staffers, please take note. #BarrHearing

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) May 1, 2019

Mueller’s letter to Barr:

I previously sent you a letter dated March 25, 2019, that enclosed the introduction and executive summary for each volume of the Special Counsel’s report marked with redactions to remove any information that potentially could be protected by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure that concerned declination decisions; or that related to a charged case. We also had marked an additional two sentences for review and have now confirmed that these sentences can be released publicly.

Accordingly, the enclosed documents are in a form that can be released to the public consistent with legal requirements and Department policies. I am requesting that you provide these materials to Congress and authorize their public release at this time.

As we stated in our meeting of March 5 and reiterated to the Department early in the afternoon of March 24, the introductions and executive summaries of our two-volume report accurately summarize this Office’s work and conclusions. The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.

See what happened there? It’s subtle, at least to non-lawyers. Mueller’s team sent Barr executive summaries, and Barr put those aside and instead gave his own summary to Congress and to us. Not Mueller’s, his. His summary was a bad summary, Mueller tells him.

In short he did what it always seemed apparent he would do: he inserted himself between the Mueller team and 1. Congress 2. us. He inserted himself to block information in order to protect Trump, which is not surprising in the guy who sent Trump an unsolicited memo explaining how he could get away with all his crimes and obstructions.

We communicated that concern to the Department on the morning of March 25. There is new public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations. See Department of Justice, Press Release (May 17, 2017).

I can confirm! My confidence in the outcome of the investigations is not full at all! It’s pretty close to empty.

It’s a fucking cover up and it’s happening right in front of us.

I hope they’re nailing him right now.

Oh yes?

As many of us suspected & have been saying – but still WOW. https://t.co/jhUPFuFTvd

— Mimi Rocah (@Mimirocah1) April 30, 2019

Reading.

At the time the letter was sent on March 27, Barr had announced that Mueller had not found a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Barr also said Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.

Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote a previously unknown private letter to the Justice Department, which revealed a degree of dissatisfaction with the public discussion of Mueller’s work that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Oh really. Funny that Barr didn’t mention it to us.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

The letter asked Barr to release the report and gave suggestions on the redacting.

Justice Department officials said Tuesday they were taken aback by the tone of Mueller’s letter, and it came as a surprise to them that he had such concerns. Until they received the letter, they believed Mueller was in agreement with them on the process of reviewing the report and redacting certain types of information, a process that took several weeks. Barr has testified to Congress previously that Mueller declined the opportunity to review his four-page letter to lawmakers that distilled the essence of the special counsel’s findings.

So…Barr has been bullshitting us and DoJ officials. Scummier and scummier.

Erm…forget something?

This looks like it's going to be a great panel on Thursday at the BBC, with @meghamohan, @UglaStefania, @Mazharul82 & @PeterTatchell, moderated by @hugo_greenhalgh https://t.co/TjEqPEnDyI

— Rachel Savage (@rachelmsavage) April 29, 2019

Just one small problem – no L.

Is this true, @BBCPride @Inter_MediaUK? That you're having a high-profile LGBT panel but with no lesbians? If it is true, would any organiser or speaker like to comment on why they think it's OK to leave lesbians out of this conversation, and to allow others to speak for them?

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) April 30, 2019

I now make it a practice, if ever asked into a panel on LGBT questions, to say “Who are the lesbian participants?” It shouldn’t be necessary. This is SHAMEFUL.

— Philip Hensher (@PhilipHensher) April 30, 2019

Oops, embarrassing.

Hi, I’m one of the organisers of Thursday’s InterMedia UK event. As organisers, we’re taking on board all points raised re: host / panel line-up, & acting accordingly to ensure the best possible representation of voices. More info will be communicated out in due course. Thank you

— Jon Holmes (@jonboy79) April 30, 2019

He found one! Whew!

https://twitter.com/jonboy79/status/1123346856489160705

Well it is very easy to forget lesbians. The L is alllllllll the way at the beginning of LGBT so by the time you’ve gotten to the T, you’ve simply forgotten all about the L.

Rebecca Solnit is seeing a lot of unconscious bias going on:

I’ve just spent a month watching white male people in particular arguing about who has charisma or relatability or electability. They speak as if these were objective qualities, and as if their own particular take on them was truth or fact rather than taste, and as if what white men like is what everyone likes or white men are who matters, which is maybe a hangover from the long ugly era when only white men voted. It’s a form of self-confidence that verges on lunacy, because one of the definitions of that condition is the inability to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective realities.

She points out that a lot of male pundits “whose misogyny helped shape the race” in 2016 were later accused of sexual harassment.

Meanwhile, the New York Times in all its august unbearability just published this prize sentence in a piece about Joe Biden’s failure to offer Anita Hill an apology she found adequate: “Many former Judiciary Committee aides and other people who participated did not want to talk on the record because they feared that scrutiny of Mr. Biden’s past conduct would undermine the campaign of the candidate some think could be best positioned to defeat President Trump, whose treatment of women is a huge issue for Democrats.” That translates as, let’s run a guy whose treatment of women is an issue, and let’s ignore that treatment because even so we think that he’s best positioned to defeat the guy whose treatment of women is an issue, and also fuck treatment of women, especially this black woman, as an issue, really.

The trouble is, you see, that women lack charisma. Sad but true. Men have explained that to Solnit.

A friend of mine posted some praise of Elizabeth Warren, and a man jumped in to say, “It’s a moot point because she’s not going to get into office. With any luck Bernie Sanders is going to do that.” I’ve heard a lot of white men explain that Warren can’t win because she’s wonky, and then when I mention that our last two Democratic presidents were famously wonky, I get to hear why they had charisma and Warren doesn’t.

It’s almost as if, to a lot of men, unless a female person is 19 or under and smokin’ hot, she’s repellent. Too wonky, not charismatic enough, too smart, not relatable enough…just wrong, somehow. Them’s the rules.

What makes a candidate electable is in part how much positive coverage they get, and how much positive coverage they get is tied to how the media powers decide who is electable, and so goes the double bind.

The media powers aren’t always the right people to be deciding who is electable. (That’s deliberate understatement, of an extreme kind.)