Well now here’s a turnup for the books: Scottish Labour has deselected a candidate for tweeting an image that calls Joanna Cherry a TERF and implies she should be shot.

The Scottish Labour candidate who posted a controversial image on Twitter involving her SNP rival has been dropped by the party.

Frances Hoole, a care and support worker, had been chosen to stand as the Labour candidate in the General Election in the Edinburgh South West constituency, attempting to unseat incumbent MP Joanna Cherry.

However last week Ms Hoole, who has been part of Labour’s Jo Cox leadership programme, posted an image on Twitter in which she and Ms Cherry had been photo-shopped, with the caption “Bang! And the

We may hate him but the Russians don’t.

Russian experts, government officials, and prominent talking heads often deride the American president for his Twitter clangor, haphazard approach to foreign policy, clownish lack of decorum, and unfiltered stream of verbalized consciousness. But all the reasons they believe Trump “isn’t a very good president” for America are precisely their reasons for thinking he is so great for Russia.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a Russian client whose regime teetered on the brink of collapse only to be saved definitively by Trump’s chaotic approach to the Middle East, recently said that “President Trump is the best type of president for a foe.” The Russians heartily agree. The Trump presidency has been wildly successful

Some months back “Jessica” Yaniv was Twitter-promoting a municipal pool party for teenagers and making it creepily obvious he was being creepy and pervy about it, and then he got suspended from Twitter for awhile and was preoccupied with losing his suit against the women who didn’t want to pull the hairs out of his scrotum. But now! It’s all happening all over again.

Yaniv:

THANK YOU to the @CityofSurrey for putting on an All Bodies Youth Swim Pool Party for #LGBTQ youth ages 13-18. Taking place at the Newton Recreation Centre on Nov 10th! All my LGBTQ2 allies please call (604) 501-5540 to show your support! So happy! https://surrey.ca/culture-recreation/30270.aspx #Surrey

So I follow the link, and: he’s not … Read the rest

The Democrat seems to have won the governor’s race in Kentucky despite or because of Trump’s rally there on Monday. If so, the Republican has flagrantly disobeyed Trump’s orders.

After all, the President was in Kentucky the day before Tuesday’s election. And he said this to Bevin: “If you lose, they’re going to say Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world. This was the greatest. You can’t let that happen to me!”

His modest self-effacement never ceases to amaze.

Chris Cillizza goes on to compare the charisma-levels of Bevin and Trump.

Trump is an entertainer, with a type of wit, humor and real charisma. Bevin, well, isn’t. Where Trump comes across to his supporters as a

Updating to add: story from 2018. She’s now been promoted to his adviser though, so the information is hotly relevant.

Ah the old “send me money and God will reward you tenfold” scam, this time from Trump’s “spiritual adviser.” Yeah right.

Paula White, who heads up the president’s evangelical advisory committee, suggested making a donation to her ministries to honor the religious principle of “first fruit,” which she said is the idea that all firsts belong to God, including the first harvest and, apparently, the first month of your salary.

“Right now I want you to click on that button, and I want you to honor God with his first fruits offering,” she said in a video shared to

Gordon Sondland suddenly remembered he’d got it exactly opposite. Gosh he’ll forget his own name next! Isn’t memory a funny thing!

Gordon Sondland, President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, reversed himself in new testimony to House impeachment investigators, saying he does believe military aid for Ukraine was contingent upon the launch of politically motivated probes.

In his revised statement, Sondland said he told a top Ukrainian official on Sept. 1 that hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the beleaguered U.S. ally would “likely” be held up unless the government announced investigations of Trump’s political rivals.

Oh well fortunately it wasn’t a crucial point in the impeachment inquiry, no more significant than what color socks he … Read the rest

Marks and Spencer recently announced a “gender-neutral” policy for its changing rooms. Quite a few women objected; some of them wrote to M&S directly. Rose George is one:

A response from @marksandspencer about their awful decision to refuse to guarantee single-sex changing facilities to women and girls. Pretty much identical to what they tweeted @JeanHatchet

And my response.

Just look at that pathetic mess. “As a business, we strive to be inclusive and therefore, we allow customers the choice of which fitting room they feel comfortable to use, in respect of how they identify themselves.” But not “in respect of” what they really are and how vulnerable they may be to spying creeping perving men if they can’t have … Read the rest

Yovanovitch was in terrible danger in Ukraine – danger from Trump’s Twitter.

On 24 April this year, she received a call from Carol Perez, the director general of the foreign service, speaking to her in cryptic tones as if Yovanovitch’s life was in danger if she remained at her ambassadorial post in Kyiv. She spoke as if there was a threat too awful to describe clearly on a phone line.

“She said that there was a lot of concern for me, that I needed to be on the next plane home to Washington,” Yovanovitch recalled in her testimony to the congressional committees conducting impeachment hearings. Taken aback, the ambassador to Ukraine wanted to know what the sudden panic was

Charles Pierce at Esquire has been reading the transcript of Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony, and has learned that Sean Hannity was helping Trump tell lies about her.

Schiff: And did you ever find out when, you know, the allegations were being made or the attacks were being made by Donald Trump, Jr., or Rudy Giuliani, did you ever find out what the Secretary of State’s position, whether the Secretary of State was going to defend you or not, apart from the refusal by the Secretary to issue a statement in your defense?

Yovanovitch: What I was told by Phil Reeker was that the Secretary or perhaps somebody around him was going to place a call to Mr. Hannity on Fox

Back in August I did a couple of posts about cricket player Maxine Blythin. I missed the news a month later:

🏆 | What a season she’s had!

Your 2019 Kent Women Player of the Year is…. Maxine Blythin!

What a season indeed! Taking a woman’s place on the team and then taking an award from a woman.

One poignant reply a few minutes ago:

I teach at a girls’ school in Kent. We’ve had speakers in from Kent cricket to encourage the girls to view cricket as a sport for them. I guess that was all just a lie.

Oh not at all, girls can still play, they just have to be prepared for boys to be … Read the rest

Garrett Epps points out:

Trump has, one way or another, changed our national life irrevocably. When one side of a political struggle has shown itself willing to commit crimes, collaborate with foreign powers, destroy institutions, and lie brazenly about facts readily ascertainable to anyone, should the other side—can the other side—then pretend these things did not happen?

Some Democratic leaders are proclaiming that we can go back to the world before Trump—and before Brett Kavanaugh and Mitch McConnell, before Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani, before an invasion of a secure facility at the Capitol, before babies were torn from their mothers and caged, before racist rhetoric from the White House and massacres at a synagogue and an El