Just in case you were worried that the Trump mob is too busy looking for moles to keep on torturing people they don’t like – worry no more: they’re still at it.

The Trump administration announced a new rule Thursday that would allow immigrant children with their parents to be held in detention indefinitely, upending a ban on indefinite detention that has been in place for 20 years.

The rule, proposed by the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, goes into effect in 60 days and will allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to keep children with their mothers in detention facilities while their cases for asylum play out in court.

…

A DHS official speaking

This is what those “unsung heroes” who are secretly trying to keep Trump from smashing all the porcelain are actually doing: giving huge tax cuts to billionaires while seeing to it that poor people are thrown out of the food stamps program. Please tell us more about how noble and courageous they are.

Nearly two million low-income Americans, including 469,000 households with young children, would be stripped of benefits under the House version of the farm bill being considered this week by congressional negotiators, according to an analysis by a nonpartisan research firm.

The bill, a multiyear spending measure that narrowly passed the House in June, includes a proposal to reformulate income and expense criteria for the 42 million

The Democrats at the Kavanaugh hearing are throwing down.

On Day 1, Senate Democrats tried to stop the hearing before it even started. On Day 3, they went into full-on revolt: One by one, starting with Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), they threatened to release confidential documents about President Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Brett M. Kavanaugh.

“I am going to release the email about racial profiling, and I understand the penalty comes with potential ousting from the Senate,” he said. Within the hour, Booker did just that.

Other Democratic senators soon joined in, threatening to release confidential emails and documents from Kavanaugh’s time as a lawyer in the George W. Bush White House. Senate Minority Leader Charles E.

Sarah Sanders ventriloquising the lunatic she works for:

For those of you asking for the identity of the anonymous coward: pic.twitter.com/RpWYPHa6To

— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) September 6, 2018

The media’s wild obsession with the identity of the anonymous coward is recklessly tarnishing the reputation of thousands of great Americans who proudly serve our country and work for President Trump. Stop. If you want to know who this gutless loser is, call the opinion desk of the failing NYT at 212-556-1234 and ask them. They are the only ones complicit in this deceitful act. We stand united together and fully support our President Donald J. Trump.

We might as well be brawling in a bar.… Read the rest

Don’t worry, folks, it’s all just hysteria.

During opening statements at the start of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) repeatedly dismissed concerns that Kavanaugh will play a key role in restricting women’s reproductive rights as mere “hysteria.”

Is it time to remind Ben Sasses that the root word of hysteria means “uterus”?

Also, is Ben Sasses seriously claiming that Kavanaugh will not tip the balance of the Court? Because nine is really not such a big number that he should be confused about it.

Referring to a string of protesters who were thrown out of the hearing while yelling things like, “stop the oppression of women!“, Sasse said, “People are going to

The Guardian has a piece by Hannah Mouncey, an Australian trans woman who plays Australian rules football.

 Graham Denholm/AFL Media/Getty Images

That’s Mouncey in the red jersey.

Late last week, the AFL released its long-awaited policy on transgender participation in Australian rules football. In it are a set of requirements trans women need to follow if they aim to play at AFLW level. These include having your testosterone below a certain level for two years, which I have no problem with, as well as the requirement that trans women undertake number of physical tests designed to ascertain if they have an advantage over cis women playing AFLW – the presumption being that this is because they are trans.

Oh lord, so confused. About those “pronoun badges” offered by the Edinburgh Student Union…

While I personally see this as a fantastic step forward on EUSA’s part, the wider reaction on Facebook has been less than encouraging. In a poll, 81 per cent of people (at the time of publishing) said that they don’t think the pronoun badges are a good idea, with only 19 per cent of respondents voting in favour.

While the results of this poll surprised me, many of the comments on both the original article and the poll unfortunately did not. In response to the original article, one Facebook user simply responded with a gif which stated “we need a new plague”. On the

There’s the dreadful news from Rio:

The stately national museum, once home to Brazil’s royal family, was still smoldering at sunrise on Monday when scores of researchers, museum workers and anthropologists began gathering outside, dressed in black.

Some sobbed as they began taking stock of the irreplaceable losses: Thousands, perhaps millions, of significant artifacts had been reduced to ashes Sunday night in a devastating fire. The hall that held a 12,000-year-old skeleton known as Luzia, the oldest human remains discovered in the Americas, was destroyed.

…

In recent years, state and city governments in Brazil have failed to pay police officers and doctors on time. Public libraries and other cultural centers have shut down. The ranks of the

The word “lesbian” used to be considered ooky because lesbians were considered ooky. Then there was Stonewall, and activism, and increased visibility, and Alison Bechdel, and Ellen, and Maddow. And then the word somehow became ooky again, apparently because it was somehow not “inclusive” enough. So when York Civic Trust put up a plaque to honor Ann Lister it carefully avoided That Word. It said “Gender-nonconforming entrepreneur. Celebrated marital commitment, without legal recognition, to Ann Walker in this church. Easter, 1834.”

And there was a stink, and a petition, and it worked.

A draft of the new wording will be proposed and opened for public comment in the coming weeks.

An online petition calling on York Civic Trust to