The Far Corner Café:

Click to embiggen.

I wanted to post about this yesterday but I couldn’t find reporting that got all the facts in one place. The Guardian has collected them:

Democrats including leading candidates for the presidential nomination have fiercely condemned Donald Trump and other Republicans’ efforts to smear the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, while urging other party leaders to do the same.

Attacks labeling one of two Muslim women in Congress as unpatriotic are “dangerous” and risk “inciting violence”, prominent progressives said on Friday, after Trump shared a video attacking Omar that included graphic footage of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Let’s not pretend that such things don’t risk inciting violence. We know they do.

Just last week, a Trump supporter in New York was charged with threatening to kill Omar. On Friday, Trump escalated attacks on Omar, tweeting “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!” with a video edited to suggest Omar was dismissive of the September 11 attacks.

The video used part of a speech last month to the Council on American-Islamic Relations in which Omar discussed the problem of Islamophobia, describing “the discomfort of being a second-class citizen”. After September 11, she said, advocates “recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties”.

The Fox-Trump faction zeroed in on “some people did something,” which is not the best choice of words but then the Fox-Trump people make some pretty terrible word choices themselves. Trump’s tweeting of that video is disgusting, as is the fact that he pinned it.

Rightwing critics have used an edited clip of the “some people did something” comment to falsely claim Omar, a migrant from Somalia, is un-American or not loyal to the US. Fox News and the New York Post, both owned by Rupert Murdoch, have devoted high-profile coverage to the misleading claims. Republican party chair Ronna McDaniel has also attacked the congresswoman.

Omar and others have called such smears a “dangerous incitement” to violence. Rashida Tlaib, the other Muslim American woman in Congress, was the first on Friday to call for Democrats to “speak up”.

“Enough is enough,” she wrote. “No more silence, with NY Post and now Trump taking Ilhan’s words out of context to incite violence toward her, it’s time for more Dems to speak up. Clearly the GOP is fine with this shameful stunt, but we cannot stand by.”

The Republican party and, in particular, the president.

Trump’s tweet on Friday came less than a month after a major white supremacist terror attack targeting Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand. The president’s own comments and falsehoods about September 11 have long attracted criticism.

He has repeated false claims about “thousands and thousands of” Muslims in New Jersey celebrating on the day itself; his business received money meant for small businesses affected by the attack, even though his businesses were not; he has claimed to have helped clear rubble from the attack site, a claim for which evidence does not exist; he has said he watched people jump from the World Trade Center towers from Trump Tower, four miles away, which would not be possible.

Perhaps most famously, in an interview hours after the attack on the World Trade Center, part of attacks in which 2,977 people were killed, Trump described his shock and disbelief. Then he added a comment that left his interviewers “stunned”.

Trump, claimed, falsely, that one of his own buildings had been “the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan”, after the World Trade Center.

“And now it’s the tallest,” he said.

How about putting that on the front page of the NY Post?

The pundits are declaring Elizabeth Warren irrelevant (after years of announcing she should run for president when she had only just started being a senator and was focused on that), but her ideas matter either way.

But since her initial announcement in December, Warren’s campaign has rolled out a series of detailed policy proposals in quick succession, outlining structural changes to major industries, government functions, and regulatory procedures that would facilitate more equitable representation in the federal government and overhaul the economy in favor of the working class. These policy proposals have made Warren the Democratic party’s new intellectual center of gravity, a formidable influence who is steadily pushing the presidential primary field to the left and forcing all of her primary challengers to define their political positions against hers.

The Democrats desperately need more of that. They’ve been letting themselves be dragged to the right since forever, and they need to knock it off.

Warren outlined a huge overhaul of the childcare system that would revolutionize the quality, cost and curriculum of early childhood education, with subsidies for families and a living wage for caregivers. It’s a proposal that she talks about in the context of her own career when, as a young mother and fledgling legal mind, she almost had to give up a job as a law professor because childcare for her young son was too expensive.

Warren has also proposed a housing plan that would limit huge investors’ abilities to buy up homes, give incentives for localities to adopt renters’ protections, and build new public housing. Crucially, and uniquely, her housing plan would also provide home ownership grants to buyers in minority communities that have historically been “redlined”, a term for the racist federal housing policies that denied federally backed mortgages to black families. The provision, aimed to help black and brown families buy their first homes, is a crucial step toward amending the racial wealth gap, and it has helped sparked a broader conversation within the party about the need to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves – a concept that Warren has also endorsed.

It’s easier to kneecap candidates than it is to kneecap ideas.

More of that cis privilege that women are so loaded with: a bill criminalizing most abortion is now law in Ohio.

The six-week abortion ban known as the “heartbeat bill” is now law in Ohio. That makes Ohio the sixth state in the nation to attempt to outlaw abortions at the point a fetal heartbeat can be detected.

Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill Thursday afternoon, just one day after it passed the Republican-led General Assembly. The law is slated to take effect in 90 days, unless blocked by a federal judge.

Now known as the “Human Rights Protection Act,” SB 23 outlaws abortions as early as five or six weeks into a pregnancy, before many women know they’re pregnant. It is one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country.

Once they realize they’re pregnant, it’s too late to stop being pregnant. Hahahahaha got you there, women! Sucks to be you. Shoulda thought of that before you decided to be born female, huh?

“The essential function of government is to protect the most vulnerable among us, those who don’t have a voice,” DeWine said as he signed the bill.

Is that right? Then let’s save flies, mosquitoes, bacteria, mildew spores, bed bugs. They don’t have a voice! It’s up to us to protect them!

Also note that DeWine is never going to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term.

The Ohio Senate originally passed the bill last month. The Republican-led House Health Committee then made several changes before sending it to the House floor, where it passed by party-line vote.

Beyond changing the name, the Ohio House version allows for the use of transvaginal ultrasounds to detect a fetal heartbeat even earlier in a pregnancy.

The bill institutes criminal penalties for doctors who violate the law. Doctors who perform abortions after detecting a heartbeat would face a fifth-degree felony and up to a year in prison. The legislation also allows the State Medical Board to take disciplinary actions against doctors found in violation and impose penalties of up to $20,000.

It will probably go to the Supreme Court. The forced-pregnancy views are the majority there.

No Pride Parade for you, Edmonton.

It is with heavy hearts that we inform you that the Board of Directors has voted to cancel the 2019 Edmonton Pride Festival. In light of the current political and social environment, it has been determined that any attempt to host a Festival will not be successful. Please keep in mind that we are a not-for-profit organization run almost solely by volunteers.

It has always been the goal of the Edmonton Pride Festival Society to host a safe and enjoyable event that is as reflective and encompassing of the entire community as possible, however given current events, we do not feel that this is attainable for this year.

Daily Hive has the details:

The cancellation announcement comes less than one week after a controversial meeting that saw police called after members of Shades of Colour, a community APIRG group that exists to advocate for queer and trans Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour, arrived to make speeches during the meeting.

I had to look up “APIRG” – Alberta Public Interest Research Group.

According to a post published on Shades of Colour’s Facebook page, The Edmonton Pride Festival Society believed that Shades of Colour and RaricaNow, a non-profit organization that promotes the rights of LGBTIQ+ refugees and newcomers in Canada, had arrived to protest, which prompted the call to police.

Shades of Colour states that neither their members nor RaricaNow’s members were protesting.

…

Following EPFS’ decision to cancel this year’s Pride Parade, Shades of Colour issued a release stating their disappointment at the outcome.

“It is with profound disappointment that we express our appallment at the actions carried out by the Edmonton Pride Festival Society, which culminated in their decision to cancel the 2019 Pride Festival,” an April 10 Shades of Colour post read.

“We are calling this decision for what it is: namely, a disavowal of deep systematic problems in the framework of EPFS as well as an attempt to dismiss, target, and put out of play the efforts put on the part of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour in the LGBTQ2S+ to point towards alternatives on how this organization carries out its activities.”

The parade was stopped for half an hour last year when people protesting the presence of cops and the military brought it to a halt.

In the months leading up to the April 4 meeting, Shades of Colour had laid out a list of seven demands for the 2019 Pride Parade, which included that the event open with a “protest lead by QTIBPOC, trans folks and their allies” that would replace the Pride Parade, and that all participants of said protest be either approved or denied by Shades of Colour and RaricaNow following an application process.

The demands also included that both Shades of Colour and RaricaNow be supplied with $20,000 each of the annual funds, that the SOC Team and the RaricaNow team be provided with money to access ongoing training, that $1,500 be provided to fund a SOC organized QTIBPOC sober dance party on the evening of pride, that a public accountability statement outlining the harm the EPFS has caused the QTIBPOC community be written along with a public commitment to rectifying that harm, that Shades of Colour and RaricaNow be featured on the front four pages of the Pride Guide, and that EPFS work with RaricaNow to support QTIBPOC refugees and newcomers.

So, that’s not a “protest,” that’s a set of demands, and quite exorbitant demands at that.

H/t Screechy Monkey

Ratzinger is back, telling us the rapey priests problem is all the fault of liberalism.

“Why did paedophilia reach such proportions? Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God,” Benedict wrote in the 6,000-word essay published on Thursday in the German monthly Klerusblatt, the Catholic News Agency and other conservative media.

No. What was absent was recognition that other people are not Things for one’s own sexual gratification. What was missing was the minimal decency to refrain from traumatizing children for personal pleasure.

Benedict also faulted church laws that gave undue protection to accused priests. During the 1980s and 1990s, he wrote, “the right to a defence [for priests] was so broad as to make a conviction nearly impossible”.

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict spearheaded reforms of those laws in 2001 to make it easier to remove priests who abused children. Benedict took a hard line against clerical sex abuse as the Vatican’s conservative doctrinal chief and later as pope, defrocking hundreds of priests accused of raping and molesting children.

Francis has blamed the scandal on a clerical culture in the church that raises priests above the laity.

At his retirement in 2013, Benedict had said he would devote his remaining life to penance and prayer, leaving Francis to guide the church. He said in the introduction to the essay that Francis and the Vatican secretary of state had given him permission to publish. The Vatican confirmed it was written by Benedict.

Church historian Christopher Bellitto questioned if Benedict, who turns 92 next week, was being manipulated by others. He said the essay omitted the critical conclusions that arose from the pope’s February sexual abuse summit in Rome, including that “abusers were priests along the ideological spectrum, that the abuse predated the 1960s, that it is a global and not simply western problem, that homosexuality is not the issue in pedophilia”.

Emphasis mine. The abuse long predates the 60s, which suggests to me that it probably goes all the way back, because why wouldn’t it? We’re surely well familiar with the fact that some men feel perfectly entitled to use other people for their personal sexual jollies, with no compunction or concern about what those other people might prefer. We’re also well familiar with the fact that being a Catholic priest seems to do nothing to prevent that entitled feeling…and probably only encourages it because priests have such power over believers, as I gather Francis is arguing.

So, no. It ain’t the 60s and it ain’t the absence of god.

Foreign Policy pointed out in August 2017 that Wikileaks declined to publish material damaging to Russia.

In the summer of 2016, as WikiLeaks was publishing documents from Democratic operatives allegedly obtained by Kremlin-directed hackers, Julian Assange turned down a large cache of documents related to the Russian government, according to chat messages and a source who provided the records.

WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.

…

In the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of potentially damaging emails about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign, information the U.S. intelligence community believes was hacked as part of a Kremlin-directed campaign. Assange’s role in publishing the leaks sparked allegations that he was advancing a Russian-backed agenda.

…

WikiLeaks in its early years published a broad scope of information, including emails belonging to Sarah Palin and Scientologists, phone records of Peruvian politicians, and inside information from surveillance companies. “We don’t have targets,” Assange said at the time.

But by 2016, WikiLeaks had switched course, focusing almost exclusively on Clinton and her campaign.

Just some possibly useful background.

The Wagga Feminist asks a question:

So can someone explain (in a way that is logical and makes sense) why men wearing woman face in drag (exaggerated stereotypes cos I have never seen a woman look like a drag queen) is ok but white people in black face (exaggerated stereotypes of black people) is not ok. And just to be clear, focus on the first part, I know why black face is not ok, I just don’t see how drag is any different yet it is acceptable. Is it because the target of ridicule are women?

I’ve wondered the same thing.

I suppose one answer is that misogyny is even more pervasive than racism, but really that’s just the same question. Why is misogyny even more pervasive than racism? Why is it more socially acceptable than racism?

It’s not a trick question; I don’t know the answer.

Jim Wright on the Texas Congressman who wants to mandate death for women who have abortions, all of them:

Texas state Congressman Tony Tinderholt — a Republican, but of course — has reintroduced a bill before the state legislature that would outlaw abortion WITHOUT EXCEPTION and mandate the death penalty for any woman who has the procedure — even if they traveled out of state to get it.

This isn’t the first time.

Tinderholt previously introduced this bill in 2017. He had to be put under state police protection, because Texas women threatened to kill him, and they meant it.

But see, Tinderhold feels this draconian measure is necessary because WOMEN don’t take personal responsibility for sex.

Yes, you read that correctly.

“Right now, it’s real easy. Right now, they [women] don’t make it important to be personally responsible because they know that they have a backup of ‘oh, I can just go get an abortion.’ Now, we both know that consenting adults don’t always think smartly sometimes. But consenting adults need to also consider the repercussions of the sexual relationship that they’re gonna have, which is a child.”

Women don’t take personal responsibility for sex. And thus, Tinderholt says, his bill would would completely remove access to abortions and “force” women to be “more personally responsible” with sex.

Note “consenting adults” means the mother gets put to death and the father is … something something gazpacho not actually responsible for anything — certainly not to any degree of responsibility approaching DEATH.

Read on.

A psychologist at Feminist Current on how she bought into trans dogma until she didn’t any more:

Until mid-January, I was a stalwart advocate of what is commonly referred to as “transgender rights.” I didn’t waver in my belief that transwomen are women and transmen are men, that transgender individuals should be granted access to single-sex spaces based on their chosen “gender” (including female change rooms, homeless shelters, prisons, sexual assault centres, transition houses, etc.), and that those who question such beliefs were misguided at best, and transphobic bigots at worst.

Certain aspects of trans activism would occasionally unsettle me, such as self-identification being the primary requirement needed for transwomen to compete against female athletes and on women’s sports teams, but I pushed those concerns aside. This wasn’t worth my attention, when transgender individuals were supposedly being discriminated against in so many areas of society. Further, I had repeatedly read that transgender youth had a high risk for suicidal ideation and attempts, so when it came to advocating for transgender people, it was clear to me that time was of the essence.

It’s always been one of the biggest puzzles to me in this whole thing, how thoroughly some otherwise reasonable people buy into the official doctrines. I don’t expect that puzzle ever to be resolved; it just is puzzling. The core claims are so wack, so magic-adjacent, that all this furious impassioned belief is inherently surprising and baffling. I can understand buying into the idea that one must pretend to believe it all more easily than I can understand actually believing it all. (That’s still not very easily though. We don’t normally think we have to pretend to think other people’s flaky beliefs are true [with the massive exception of religious beliefs], so why has this one so suddenly and furiously been made socially mandatory?) The suicide explanation is some answer, I guess, but then that claim itself is not particularly credible on its face and falls apart if you do any research on it. So…it’s puzzling. Mystifying, in fact.

I discounted those who didn’t agree with my belief system — or rather, shouted online at them, in 280 characters or less. I used my PhD in clinical psychology as a sword, despite the fact my knowledge of the science and psychology of sex and gender was minimal. Most people who disagreed with me were women, who repeatedly stated that males could not become female, and that while the rights of every individual in society must be respected and protected, the rights of one group (trans-identified people) cannot be realized at the expense of another (women).

When asked why I believed transwomen were, in fact, women, I asserted that some boys and girls are “born in the wrong body,” and that our brains are gendered (thus, transwomen had a male body, but a “woman’s brain”). When asked to elaborate, I pointed to vague notions of “knowing” and “feeling,” rather than terms that were rooted in science and could be operationalized. When asked to explain further, I resorted to circular reasoning: some men feel like women, and only women can feel like women, therefore some men are women. When pushed on the question of how it is possible to “feel like a woman,” I’d argue that because I “felt” like a woman, it must be true.

Ah but do you “feel like a woman”? How do you know? How do you know you don’t just feel like yourself, while knowing that you are in fact a woman? I think that better describes what most of us think. We’ve always been told we’re female, so being ourselves is being female, just as it’s various other things we’ve always been told about ourselves; it’s not some special essence or core that is feelinglikeawoman. We can’t generalize from our own claim to “feel like a woman” to the existence of some essential “feeling like a woman” that exists independently of female people who grow up being treated like female people.

But at the time the formula worked for Alicia Hendley until it didn’t any more.

But early this year, everything changed. In January, information about the alleged misbehaviour of a self-declared transwoman (“JY”) was revealed. Initially known for filing human rights complaints against 16 Canadian women who declined to wax male genitals, JY was now alleged to have made predatory comments about young girls online. One comment JY allegedly left said, “Every single time I take that ferry there’s field trips with 10-12 year old girls on it… If a girl asks me for a pad or tampon and help on how to use it, if it’s her first time, what do I do?” A selfie of JY in the women’s washroom, which included girls standing in the background, also began to circulate.

People tried to talk about it, and found themselves kicked off social media for doing so. This made Hendley uneasy, so she consulted…Morgane Oger.

We spoke for almost an hour, and Oger listened to my concerns, telling me that other women had reached out regarding JY’s behaviour as well. Oger stated that it would be fruitless to bring such concerns to law enforcement unless there was concrete, verifiable evidence to present them with. I was encouraged to find possible sources and to get in touch if I found any. Based on our conversation, I felt Oger was troubled by the accusations that were being made against JY and was taking them seriously.

During our call, Oger mentioned an event that had occurred a few days earlier at the Vancouver Public Library, discussing gender identity ideology and women’s rights. While I was not at the presentation and could not comment on what occurred, I was struck by Oger’s description: “It was like 1933 Berlin.”

Hendley’s husband and children are Jewish, and that comparison was a large step too far. The slide began.

More conflicting thoughts followed. Was there any evidence that transgender people were at risk of imminent extermination, similar to vulnerable groups during the Holocaust? No.

Were transgender people, as a group, more vulnerable than women? I had no evidence to support this claim.

Was silencing women who say that transwomen are not women (and transmen are not men) a punishment that fits the “crime”? Should referring to a self-identified transwoman as “he,” even inadvertently, mean that women deserve to have online methods of communication (a vital tool for women, enabling them to participate in both public and private conversations) cut off? No.

She used her academic training and did a lot of research.

Like so many other women before me, I reached my “peak.” And finally, even though it may have taken a long time, I tipped, falling away from the beliefs ascribed by gender identity ideology, and onto firmer ground. I was no longer willing to “affirm” transgender individuals at any cost, especially if it cost us women’s rights. I was no longer willing to agree that the end (transitioning a teen) necessarily justifies the means (using scare tactics about suicide on parents). I was no longer willing to perceive every transgender person as made of finely spun glass, too fragile to be questioned, and capable of being broken by mere words. I was no longer willing to sacrifice truth and ethics for political correctness.

Now, when I reflect on my “switch” from being an unrelenting trans activist/“ally” to being critical of gender identity ideology and legislation, I’m chilled at how easy it was for me — a psychologist (now retired), ostensibly trained to understand the human mind — to become so caught up in the momentum of “trans rights” that I avoided critical thought, much like a new member of a cult.

Quite. The culty aspects are very obvious and very disturbing. It’s obviously not a coincidence that trans activism has a lot of both: 1) magic-adjacent claims and 2) ferocious bullying of dissenting women. If the claims were less magic-adjacent they wouldn’t be so god damn hard to believe, and thus wouldn’t require all this bullying and ostracism and silencing to enforce belief and repetition.

And, while I’m reluctant to call trans activism a “cult,” I’m aware of many disconcerting similarities: the absolute refusal to allow anyone to criticize issues; silencing, smearing, and ostracizing those who do ask questions (in this case, labeling them “transphobic”) about the ideology of transgenderism; and pressuring individuals (from parents to health professionals) to blindly adhere to the view that some people are “born in the wrong body,” and that the only way to “fix” this error is through medical intervention, such as puberty-suppressing drugs, cross-sex hormones, and various surgeries, rather than with psychological intervention. And, much like in a cult, those who push gender identity ideology discourage independent thought, and instead respond to requests for evidence and facts to support their beliefs with platitudes, mantras, and scare tactics, repeated over and over, until they become reality.

All of that, with knobs on.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

Wicky Who? What Leeks?

He doesn’t know. Never heard of him. Not his deal. No opinion. Not on his radar. Nothing to do with him. K?

Maybe the House Oversight Committee will be able to get some clarity on why all those denials of security clearances got thrown out.

A former White House official accused of overturning recommended denials for security clearances during the Trump administration will appear before the House Oversight Committee on April 23, his lawyer told the panel in a letter Wednesday, despite his counsel’s pleas to postpone his testimony.

Carl Kline, who served as the White House personnel security director during the first two years of the Trump administration, will appear for the deposition as part of the panel’s long-standing investigation into security clearances under President Trump. The committee subpoenaed Kline in early April after a whistleblower in his office, Tricia Newbold, alleged that the White House was acting recklessly with the nation’s secrets by granting security clearances to individuals whom employees like her found unworthy.

Not “unworthy,” as I understand it, so much as risky.

Newbold, a nearly two-decade veteran of the security-clearance process who still works in the White House, told the committee in late March that Kline overruled multiple clearance-denial recommendations and then retaliated against her when she objected. One of those was the clearance application for Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top White House adviser, The Washington Post has reported.

A “top White House adviser” with zero relevant education or experience, who was given the job on a silver platter solely because he is married to the princess. Now he is unworthy, but the issue with a security clearance has more to do with security than with qualifications. Kushner is compromised six ways from Sunday, and “compromised” is a big red flag in security matters.

Assange is busted at last.

Police have forcibly removed the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and arrested him, after the Ecuadorian government withdrew asylum.

Appearing before Westminster magistrates, Assange was found guilty of breaching bail and was told he would face a jail sentence of up to 12 months when he is sentenced at crown court.

The 47-year-old had been taken into police custody for failing to surrender to bail and on a US extradition warrant, after Metropolitan police officers were invited into the Knightsbridge embassy. He had taken refuge there for almost seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation.

Worse all the time, worse every day, worse worse worse.

President Sociopath laments that US troops at the border can't get "a little rough," because "everybody would go crazy … can’t act like they would normally act — or like, let’s say, another military from another country would act." Via NBC. pic.twitter.com/byUdS5wMPR

— HawaiiDelilah™ (@HawaiiDelilah) April 10, 2019

How very squalid. Trump’s sister the judge retired so as to escape the consequences of a judicial complaint about the Trump siblings’ gigantic tax fraud. She keeps her pension, she keeps all the millions, nothing happens to her.

President Trump’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has retired as a federal appellate judge, ending an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules by participating in fraudulent tax schemes with her siblings.

The court inquiry stemmed from complaints filed last October, after an investigation by The New York Times found that the Trumps had engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the inherited wealth of Mr. Trump and his siblings. Judge Barry not only benefited financially from most of those tax schemes, The Times found; she was also in a position to influence the actions taken by her family.

Retired judges aren’t subject to the conduct rules, see, so the investigation was dropped.

In retirement, Judge Barry is entitled to receive annually the salary she earned when she last met certain workload requirements. Though the exact figure was not immediately available, it appears to be between $184,500 and $217,600.

And she gets to keep all the millions they scooped in via the tax fraud.

Judge Barry had been a co-owner of a shell company — All County Building Supply & Maintenance — created by the family to siphon cash from their father’s empire by marking up purchases already made by his employees, The Times investigation found. Judge Barry, her siblings and a cousin split the markup, free of gift and estate taxes, which at the time were levied at a much higher rate than income taxes.