Wait a minute.

The premier of Alberta:

Eid Mubarak!
Wishing all Albertans who celebrate Eid al-Adha tonight peace and joy, and many blessings for the year ahead.#EidAlAdha #ableg #abpoli pic.twitter.com/LSA47PDUrz

— Rachel Notley (@RachelNotley) August 20, 2018

I’m all for politicians being welcoming and affirming and all that, especially of groups who are targets of hatred and scorn…but putting on hijab to do it? Women are targets of hatred and scorn, and one version of that is forcing them to wear uncomfortable stifling concealing layers of cloth, often on pain of violence or even death. I don’t see why Notley couldn’t send a friendly Eid Mubarak without putting on a Modesty Garment to do it.

https://twitter.com/miss9afi/status/1031950187521105921… Read the rest

Mark Joseph Stern has a very useful backgrounder at Slate on the move to stifle the black vote in Georgia.

Because of its history of racist voting laws, Randolph County was once required to seek federal permission before altering its election procedures. But after the Supreme Court gutted this oversight in 2013, the county was freed to crack down on the franchise. It is no coincidence that its election board chose this moment to shutter most of its polls: In November, the popular Democrat Stacey Abrams will compete for the governorship against Republican Brian Kemp, the current Georgia secretary of state. Kemp, who has devoted his time in office to a ruthless campaign of voter suppression, called upon

Trump at his most graceful:

Speaking before agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection officers, Trump lashed out at opponents of ICE and CBP (which Trump repeatedly referred to as CBC) who have blocked access to ICE offices and called for abolition of the agency over the administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents and strict enforcement of immigration laws.

“The vast majority, they’re all with you,” Trump said, calling opponents a small group that gets a lot of publicity.

“They have no courage, they have no guts, just big loudmouths. We don’t want to put up with that.”

Ah that reminds me of someone, who can it be. Oh yes, chickenshit  big … Read the rest

That Georgia county that’s planning to close 7 of its 9 polling places is getting a lot of attention from civil rights groups.

The closures would come just before a high-stakes midterm election in which Stacey Abrams, a black woman, is the Democratic nominee for governor.

“This is nothing more than a racially motivated, voter suppression scheme that aims to lock Black voters out of a historic election cycle,” Kristen Clarke, who leads the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, tweeted on Sunday. The Lawyers’ Committee, representing three Georgia civil rights groups, sent a letter to the Randolph County Board of Elections and Registration threatening legal action if the plan moves forward.

It’s a rural county, with no public … Read the rest

Oh good god.

This is spectacular. pic.twitter.com/rGybFAAva4

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) August 20, 2018

Staggered by the malevolent stupidity of that opening I rushed to find the source: “The ‘Nanette’ Problem.”

It took me a while to write a critique of Nanette, the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby’s universally praised one-woman Netflix special that premiered in June, because I couldn’t quite figure out what I hated about it.

But when my cis, straight, liberal parents told me how much they loved it, the reason for my dislike coalesced: In order to make straight, cis viewers feel comfortably woke, Gadsby shits on an entire language of comedy developed over decades largely by Jews and queers. The greatest trick Gadsby pulls is

Heads of government aren’t supposed to punish their critics. That may be normal in Saudi Arabia, but it’s not normal in putative democracies.

Nixon did it anyway.

Nixon’s Enemies List, officially called his “Opponents List,” was a document that was initially compiled by presidential advisor George T. Bell for Charles Colson, the infamous “hatchet man.” Colson turned over the list to White House Counsel John Dean on September 9, 1971. The list, which at first included 20 names, was a compilation of figures from all walks of life, ranging from the actor Paul Newman (“Radic-Lib causes … Heavy McCarthy involvement ’68”) to journalists such as Mary McGrory and Daniel Schorr (a “real media enemy”) to politicians like the

I guess some people are saying Trudeau should apologize to the Saudis, because a former Canadian ambassador to the UN says he should not.

Urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to jump on a plane to Riyadh to apologize for Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s tweet on Saudi human rights abuses is bad advice. Suggesting that we should seek U.S. President Donald Trump’s intervention with the Saudis is no better. And portraying Saudi Arabia as a friend and ally is preposterous.

Apologists for the Saudis need to give their heads a shake. Saudi Arabian authorities continue to subject peaceful dissidents to arbitrary arrests, trials and convictions. Human rights defenders are imprisoned and tortured into confessing.

Saudi authorities continue to discriminate

Nick Little on the busy Pennsylvania priests:

Yesterday a Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was released, detailing credible accusations of sexual abuse against over 300 priests in just six dioceses. Over 1,000 child victims were identified.

That’s a lot of priests and a lot of child victims. And yet, and yet, they still consider themselves to have the moral authority not only to tell us what to do, but also to stop us, forcibly, doing things they consider Religiously Forbidden. Women putting a stop to their own pregnancies is forbidden by god but priests raping children is not. That is one very fucked up god.

While the reports against individual priests shock the conscience, the descriptions of institutional knowledge,

Does it make sense to see McCain as The Good Wing of the Republicans? The New Yorker toys with the question:

McCain spent the months after Trump’s Inauguration on an international reassurance tour, telling overseas allies the story that some Republicans in Washington were telling themselves—that Trump’s authoritarianism would be constrained by those around him, that this was a phase that would pass.

Or to put it another way, “It’s not our fault.”

“He has a lot of faith in Mattis,” Salter said, of James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense. In February, 2017, at the Munich Security Conference, an annual meeting of Western military officers and defense officials, McCain, without naming the President, delivered a broadside against Putin, Trump,

So here’s this very nice man in baggy T shirt and shorts and a baseball cap (not a MAGA cap, that I can see) talking to hotel workers in Uganda. He appears to be distraught because the electronic key to his room didn’t work. He’s apparently a missionary? Or maybe just a pretend missionary, aka a crank who uses “jesus” as a veil for abusing people. His favorite thing to call the hotel workers (who are all men, which is probably fortunate) is “bitch” – or more like “biiiitch.”

He got busted.

Uganda police arrested an older American man after reviewing a video that showed him striking out at hotel workers and using racial slurs.

The police identified the