And one more thing. (This day of the hearing is proving to be startling.) NYT reporter Carl Hulse:

Murmurs through the hearing room as Mike Flynn refuses to answer whether he believes in the peaceful transfer of power and whether the Jan. 6 violence was justified, citing his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

NYT reporter Peter Alexander:

To see a retired four-star general who swore an oath to defend the country and the Constitution plead the Fifth when asked if he believed in the peaceful transfer of power in America is another stunning moment today.

This country is in deep trouble.… Read the rest

Some observers are saying Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony indicates a seditious conspiracy.

Just so you know Hutchinson is implicating Trump and Meadows in a seditious conspiracy

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) June 28, 2022

Removing the magnetometers, in the context of the whole situation, really amounts to evidence of seditious conspiracy.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 28, 2022

Doing what? It seems the people attending the rally on the lawn were checked for weapons first, so a lot of them were shut out, because of ALL THOSE GUNS. So then apparently the White House or Trump ordered the magnetometers removed…so that heavily armed people could attend the rally and then head for the Capitol, heavily armed.

It’s…yikes.

It’s now fairly clear why

So. According to new testimony from a Trump White House aide, Trump got violent when he was told he wasn’t going to the Capitol after the January 6 rally.

Cassidy Hutchinson testifies that she was told that as then-President Donald Trump was being driven back to the White House after the Jan. 6 rally that he demanded to be taken to the Capitol and tried to grab the steering wheel from a Secret Service agent. https://t.co/JefVhEsY0b pic.twitter.com/uUyQcnSlLG

— The Associated Press (@AP) June 28, 2022

“I’m the fucking President,” he said. “Take me up to the Capitol.”… Read the rest

It’s a preview of the not at all distant future, too.

The number of people migrating globally has steadily risen in the past two decades as poverty, climate change and violence have led people to flee their homelands.

Climate change is only going to get worse, much worse and very fast, so poverty and violence will get worse too, and migrations are going to accelerate, and resistance to migrations will accelerate too. People roasted to death in the backs of trucks will be an everyday occurrence.

The bodies of more than 40 people who appeared to have crossed into the United States illegally were found on Monday in one of the worst episodes of migrant deaths on the southern

Erase erase erase erase.

Menopause is for everyone.

The NHS has ditched the terms ‘women’ and ‘woman’ from its menopause guidance, despite ministers promising to crack down on woke gender-free language in medical advice.

…

Now MailOnline has found ‘women’ and ‘woman’ have also been omitted from official advice about the menopause, which is unique to biological females.

In its online overview about the menopause, NHS advice used to contain six gender-specific mentions. But it was updated on May 17 to remove the terms.

Experts have warned de-gendering medical advice could be dangerous for women by over-complicating vital health messaging.

NHS Digital, which manages health information webpages, told MailOnline it wanted to ensure language was ‘inclusive’.

One, the goal … Read the rest

Janice Turner cops to having grown up thinking the feminist women who preceded her generation were dreary old has-beens.

Other political movements respect their elders even when their views no longer align with modern mores. Black Lives Matter would never forsake Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X; the LGBT movement deifies those who in 1969 bravely defied homophobic police at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Feminism alone lays waste to each preceding generation of leaders, campaigners and thinkers as impure, backward, irrelevant, wrong.

It’s true. That “second wave”? We weren’t really second at all, we just thought we were. I wonder often why feminism is that way, and if it’s rooted in the perceived need to Reject Mommy in … Read the rest

This happened.

Many thanks, @Baroness_Nichol pic.twitter.com/OzQnuCTWDv

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) June 27, 2022

I can’t get the Twitter version to magnify but it’s readable if I copy it in here, so that’s what I’m doing, because we need to be able to read it.

“You cannot discriminate in the provision of services because you are prejudiced.”

Oh. Bump. How disappointing.

“Irrespective of what Stonewall has told you, I fear it is simply unlawful.”

“the cancellation was the product of misguided and systemically unlawful policy.”

Oh. Bump. Oops.… Read the rest

Boys and men get to be called boys and men, but girls and women don’t get to be called girls and women. Who made that rule I wonder? And why are so many people obeying it?

JL via The Spectator in A Week in the War on Women:

Young Scot is a publicly funded organisation which received a £975,000 grant from Scottish Government last year for various projects, one of which is the provision of information for young people.

Young Scot has produced advice about menstruation but there is no mention of ‘girls’ or ‘women’ in the text. Instead, it makes vague references to “Those of us that have both our ovaries and a womb” and “

Eilis O’Hanlon in the Independent (Ireland):

The coalition now known as Trans Equality Together launched last Monday with the stated aim of ensuring “trans and non-binary people are equal, safe and valued”.

By Thursday, it had secured the signatures of such august bodies as the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Amnesty Ireland and the National Women’s Council on a letter denouncing RTÉ for daring to host a debate on Liveline with women who refuse to bend to the notion that anyone with a penis must be automatically accepted as a woman if they say they are one.

So that’s what equal, safe and valued mean? That women are not allowed to say men are not women?

I don’t have … Read the rest

Emily Tamkin in The New Statesman on the overturning of Roe:

I could reiterate that the laws that will now go into effect in many states banning abortion in most cases will disproportionately impact poor people, and people of colour, who do not necessarily have the financial resources or the time to go out of their home state to seek an abortion. Or I could say that, though the impact will be greatest in states where abortion will be outlawed, the whole country will be affected; a burden will now be put on providers in states where abortion remains legal, and women in those states, too, will probably find it harder to schedule an abortion.

People, people, women. Why … Read the rest

Another win for theocracy:

The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of a former high school football coach from Washington state in a case about religious freedom and prayer in public schools. In a 6 to 3 decision delivered by Justice Gorsuch, the conservative supermajority decided in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that coach Joseph Kennedy’s Christian prayers after the games were protected by freedom of speech and freedom of religion under the First Amendment. “The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike,” Gorsuch wrote.

But of course an adult in authority over teenagers is not just exercising freedom of speech and religion by … Read the rest

The tweet has since been deleted but the screenshots live on.

A former friend of Ivanka Trump has taken to social media to claim that she supported her in getting an abortion when she was younger.

In the since-deleted tweet, Lauren Santo Domingo, a high school friend of Ivanka’s, claimed to have taken Ivanka, first daughter of former President Donald Trump and former senior White House Adviser, to get the alleged abortion.

…

“Ivanka Trump you are noticeably quiet today,” Domingo’s tweet read.

“The high school friends who took you to get an abortion are not.”

Pass the brioche.… Read the rest

The horrors are rolling in.

Abortion for *lethal* fetal anomalies is now *illegal* in Ohio
 
I’m a high-risk obstetrician here. I diagnose birth defects
 
So some point soon I may look someone in the eyes & say that they, against their will, will carry to term, undergo delivery & then have their child die

— David N Hackney MD, FACOG (@DavidNHackney) June 27, 2022

Got that? In Ohio it’s now ILLEGAL to end a pregnancy that will produce a baby that can’t survive.

Here is how today’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe impacts Arkansans.

Arkansas’s abortion ban (in effect today) allows no exception for rape. It allows no exception for incest. It allows no exception for a lethal fetal condition.

Another Savita Halappanavar, although this one survived – just barely, and no thanks to the Catholic hospital that tried to kill her.

I've shared this with others over the years:

I had a miscarriage in 2010. I had zero say over my own body & nearly bled to death over a cluster of cells w/a heartbeat in a Catholic-run hospital. It was disgusting how the nurses & doctors treated the situation.

— Marina Towers (@VileVioletkitty) June 25, 2022

I recommend reading the whole thing. There are a lot of details, so it’s a long thread. I’ll share just some.

We booked an ultrasound at Westlake Hospital the next day. The only Hospital the insurance allowed me to go to.

The

Game on.

JULIE BINDEL will sue council which banned her talk at a library https://t.co/MYYraWDgbB via @MailOnline

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) June 26, 2022

Julie in The Mail:

My planned talk was cancelled on the ludicrous grounds that my views on transgender rights are ‘at odds’ with civic policy. Without speaking to me, or bothering to discover what I actually believe, the council decided to deny me the right to speak on their premises.

So I am going to sue them. On behalf of every woman who is being told to shut up and stay quiet, during the worst misogynist backlash I have witnessed in my lifetime, I’m taking the council to court.

They’ll hear very soon from my

Well I’ll be darned, here’s one that doesn’t go all coy about mentioning the W-people. Of course that could be because they’re asking for donations, so it’s not in their interest to piss off the people they’re asking to donate.

Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room.

I attended a Rally for Reproductive Rights near the Alabama state capitol today. I missed the first part, but caught most of it. It was well attended; I’m no good at estimating crowds, but I think there were 300-400 people there.

There were lots of signs, at least 50, some of them rather clever. Lots of gender neutral language. I noticed 3-4 signs that mentioned “women”; one mentioned “female” in contrast to “men”. Maybe 3-4 signs were explicitly about trans people, including “abortion is not just a cis issue”.

There were members of a local abortion clinic escort group providing informal security. I know a number of these people, and I … Read the rest

MSNBC generously gives us four men talking about abortion rights. I guess there just aren’t that many women in the world?

“The entire issue of bodily autonomy right now is very much tied into the Christian nationalist vision of America,” @imarajones talks to @MichaelSteele about the “political agenda” behind the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. pic.twitter.com/cqKJWbD83S

— AYMAN (@AymanMSNBC) June 26, 2022

… Read the rest

Sonia Sodha on the ruling:

It leaves abortion rights to the states, meaning abortion is now illegal or soon-to-be illegal in 22 states in all or most circumstances, including, in some states, in cases of rape. It comes in the wake of already reduced access to abortion in many of those states as a result of practical restrictions on the operation of abortion clinics. It is a dramatic rollback of women’s rights in one of the world’s richest countries, which prides itself on its protection of individual liberties.

Richest and in some ways most advanced…and in others most regressive, by a huge margin.

It has been estimated that maternal mortality will increase by 20% in places with a ban.

A law professor at UC Irvine contradicts Alito:

Black women’s sexual subordination and forced pregnancies were foundational to slavery. If cotton was euphemistically king, Black women’s wealth-maximizing forced reproduction was queen.

Because those forced pregnancies were worth a lot of money – money for the enslaver, of course, not for the slave.

Ending the forced sexual and reproductive servitude of Black girls and women was a critical part of the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments. The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.

Mandated, forced or compulsory pregnancy