Author: Ophelia Benson

More on the sez Jo question.

The Supreme Court decision is emblematic of the hostility towards trans people in much of the so-called justice system. Conservatives , and then Labour, appointed transphobes to head the watchdog notionally charged with protecting trans people, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Charity Commission, whose senior leadership “likes” transphobic material on social media, has funnelled huge sums of public money in charitable tax relief to organisations set up to attack trans people.

No, see, this is the basic misunderstanding or rather misrepresentation that Jolyon and people like him lean on so heavily. It’s not about “hostility to trans people”. It’s about not believing in, and resisting, the ideology. It’s the ideology, stupid.

Because the ideology is all there is – because trans people are trans people only because the ideology says so – we do dispute and reject and criticize the ideology, but that’s not the same thing as hating the people who have been duped by the ideology.

Jeffrey Blehar at the National Review skewers Trump v Kennedy Center nicely.

Trump has long betrayed a quietly deep obsession with the world of the theater arts — which he no doubt associates with the New York of his youth. He is, famously, equally as obsessed with Kennedy family glamour — why, he even found his own collectible Kennedy to add to the administration! — and desperately wants to associate his own (decidedly grubbier) name with a national martyr.

In a way that’s more appropriate than it sounds, because the putative Kennedy family glamour really isn’t all that glam. Joseph Kennedy was an awful shit – a crook and a bad human being. He got rich, so his many offspring were rich, and they were reasonably pleasant to look at, but then you could say the same of Trump.

Therefore, it was perhaps inevitable that he would take a heavy hand with the Kennedy Center — the federally owned and directed performing arts venue for the nation’s capital, named for the slain president in 1964, prior to opening. It was one of the shiniest baubles in (what he regards as) his personal presidential treasury to play with and admire.

Nobody expected him to try to slap his name on it, however. Nobody expected him to be that crude or lawless. The building is named by statute; renaming it anything else is not optional, unless approved by Congress. Trump doesn’t care: His openly stated philosophy is to put his own name (or Trump-like “stamp”) onto everything he possibly can while still president. “Nobody else will,” he says, correctly.

It’s pathetic that he’s too dim to realize how this makes him look. Donny Donny Donny – if you throw yourself across the dinner table to grab all the food and smash any you can’t pick up, you’re not going to leave your guests dumb with admiration. Now apply this aperçu to every single thing you do. You see what I mean? Everything you do is grab or smash. Everything.

His message is clear: The Kennedy Center might belong to the nation, but for now it belongs to me. And if I can’t put my name on it, I’ll simply tear it down . . . and you can’t stop me. (To emphasize the point, Trump was later photographed — quite intentionally, one imagines — on Air Force One, being presented with various plans for emergency demolition of the Kennedy Center.)

I don’t even really care about the Kennedy Center itself. JFK was his father’s kid, and not a fabulous president. The putative glamour was all about the money, just as Trump’s is – although JFK did get into Harvard, which Dumb Don certainly didn’t. I don’t really care about the Center and it’s only Trump’s vulgar determined vandalism that has nudged me into acting as if I do.

understand the repulsiveness (and quasi-blackmail) of Trump simply threatening to tear the entire building down if he can’t get his name onto it. Nobody likes the kid who cries and threatens to take his toys home if people don’t bow to his demands. But people really hate the kid who cries and threatens to take your toys home.

People sometimes ask me why, with all the potential distractions and scandals this administration regularly provides, I’ve spent so much time writing about Trump’s impossible desires to forever associate himself with the prestige of Washington, D.C. Most of all, I find this entire sordid affair to be a wonderfully emblematic miniature, summarizing Trump’s imperial arrogance in all its spectacular pettiness.

Yep that’s me. I don’t really care about the Center but by god I care about the filth that is Trump.

Jolyon taking on Goliath again.

(Why does he sign his posts “Jo Maugham”? Why so matey? We’re not your mates, mate.)

Billionaires like JK Rowling have funded a blizzard of legal attacks on the trans community – and her allies in the rightwing and far-right press have pursued a campaign of trans hate, says Jo Maugham

Why do you talk about yourself in the third person, “Jo”? We all know there is no higher-up person writing this blurb; we know it’s you; so y u talk about yourself as “Jo Maugham”? It’s cringey.

The day the Supreme Court handed down its decision on the meaning of sex under the Equality Act was the last day Anna*, a woman in her 30s, was seen or heard from. She took herself into her room, locked the door from the inside, and took her own life.

What do you mean she took herself into her room? You make her sound like a child. What room? Was a room all she had? Why was there a lock on the door, and why couldn’t it be unlocked from outside? Are you trying to up the poignancy dosage?

The notorious judgment was handed down on 16 April 2025. It followed a process in which the Supreme Court refused to hear from any trans people, ignored its legal obligation under the Human Rights Act to consider their human rights, and came to a decision without hearing any challenge to patently false findings of fact.

What does “hearing from trans people” have to do with anything? If I claim to be Jolyon Maugham, do I then have a right to be “heard from” when you say I’m not?

Anna’s death is a profound tragedy for those who loved her. But it is also merely one drop in an ocean of trans suicidality. Billionaires like JK Rowling have funded a blizzard of legal attacks on the trans community – and in tandem her allies in the rightwing and far-right press have pursued a campaign of trans hate.

Worse still is how, in a shift reminiscent of apartheid South Africa, public bodies have joined the hunt. 

Blah blah blah, the usual stuff, repeated until he gets to the end.

God-botherers draw some unwelcome attention.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s office has rescinded an honor given to a Muslim cleric who previously pledged to award an honorary title to Osama bin Laden.

Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi received the award on Friday, the 25th anniversary of 9/11, presented by Dame Sarah Mullally for reconciliation and interfaith co-operation.

Interesting timing.

The move is not universally popular

Note the shapeless lump beside the cleric dude. That’s actually a human being!

Is that smiling or…erm…preparing to bite?

Seriously why did the archbish or the church or whoever do this? And why did they include the scary parcel, aka the human being smothered in black cloth as if she were about to be buried? Why does any institution that views and treat women this way get any kind of flattery and rewarding from powerful institutions?

Men in dresses on the one hand, and women in black garbage bags on the other – it’s a pincer movement to wipe out women altogether.

A picture caption from last week stated Mr Ashrafi was being recognized “for his outstanding work as an ambassador of interfaith harmony in Pakistan”.

The National Secular Society (NSS) criticized the honor as “obscene, and almost beyond parody”, noting it was conferred on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 individuals, including 67 British citizens.

…

NSS chief executive Stephen Evans said: “We welcome the withdrawal of this award, but it is astonishing that it was given in the first place – on the anniversary of 9/11, no less. This episode reveals not only appallingly poor judgement and inadequate due diligence, but a dangerous naivety about the religious figures legitimised through interfaith engagement. A Church capable of such a serious failure of judgement should not enjoy constitutional privilege, including 26 bishops making our laws. It is time the Church of England was disestablished.”

It is astonishing. What did the archbish think of the woman so obliterated she might as well have been a bolt of cloth? The archbishop is the Church of England’s first female archbishop, yet here she is acting as if a woman treated like an obscenity is nothing to fret about.

Since when are nations described as “elite” or “the elite”? Since never, as far as I know, but Trump says it’s a thing.

Andid yever notice they’re considered ayleet, they’re the ayleet, I don’t wanna mention their names, they’re ayleet, they’re only elite because we allow them to trade with us and we allow them to make far more money than they should be, they’re not elite, we’re the ones that are elite.

I have a feeling he doesn’t have a strong grasp on what the word “elite” means.

Let’s do something obviously dangerous and also pointless, just for the fun of it.

The Trump administration is eager to press ahead with its proposed 250-foot arch at Memorial Circle, a traffic island on the historic bridge connecting Washington, D.C. to Arlington, Va.

The grassy roundabout is not far from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA): An arch would stand just about two aeronautical miles from the airport’s main runway, which is one of the busiest in the country.

“An enormous number of airplanes come over that site, basically every 45 to 60 seconds all day long ’til 11 at night,” U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat who represents that part of Virginia, told NPR. “Just imagine the disaster that could happen with all of these airplanes coming right across a 250-foot-high arch.”

That makes it more exciting! Like a roller coaster!

The no-fly zone above the National Mall forces most flights landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) from the north to approach along a narrow path along the Potomac River. Recent DCA passenger-flight-path data shows how much traffic passes through the site where the Trump administration wants to build a 250-foot arch.

So flying into National Airport is already risky, and Trump is eager to make it more so. Whatta guy, whatta pal.

A preliminary Federal Aviation Administration report said in June that the structure would likely not be an issue as long as it has blinking red obstruction lights on top, as the 555-foot-tall Washington Monument does.

Yeah let’s just throw up lots of obstacles along busy flight paths, we can always put blinking red obstruction lights on them. Blinking red lights make mistakes impossible.

NPR spoke to three aviation safety experts about the impacts of a potential arch. Their consensus: While the arch itself most likely would not pose a significant risk to most aircraft, it adds yet another variable to a notoriously crowded and complicated airspace.

“It’s a small airport with one runway, nestled in a metropolitan area that’s surrounded by prohibited airspace [near the White House and U.S. Capitol],” said Jeff Guzzetti, a retired accident investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration.

The congestion — and complexity — of D.C.’s airspace is a well-documented concern, especially after the January 2025 midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter that killed 67 people. Even so, some experts worry the FAA may be facing political pressure from Trump to rubber-stamp the project.

Ya think? It’s not as if Trump always presses people to do whatever he wants.

Shawn Pruchnicki, a former airline pilot and accident investigator who now teaches aviation safety at Ohio State University, went even further. He said putting a 250-foot arch in Memorial Circle would be “inherently dangerous.”

“This is an unbelievably ridiculous idea, to put this arch so close to this airport just for the sake of his personal needs,” Pruchnicki added, referring to Trump.

His “personal needs” being his insatiable vanity and lust for ever more visibility.

H/t What a Maroon

Trump is creating new friendships. Not with him, of course, but with people and countries not-him.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday welcomed the European Union’s ambition to make Ottawa an associate member of the 27-nation bloc and said Canadian lawmakers would ultimately vote on the final structure of the alliance.

“Canada and Europe are each strong. Europe and Canada are stronger together,” Carney told EU lawmakers in Strasbourg, France.

Canada’s prime minister did not name President Donald Trump in his speech, but he nodded to his U.S. counterpart’s use of tariffs by saying, “Economic integration is now being weaponized — tariffs being used to exert pressure.”

Trump likes to weaponize things. He also likes to sexualize things. If he can’t do one or the other, well, what’s the point of that thing at all?

[Carney’s] comments come shortly after Trump described the prospect of Canada becoming the first associate member of the EU as “laughable” and threatened the bloc with tariffs if he deemed the move to be a “hostile act.”

Speaking to reporters in North Carolina, Trump called Canada a “terrible trade partner” and said the U.S. could even “stop trading with Europe on many things” if the EU moves ahead with its plan. “If it’s a good intention, that’s fine. If it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe,” Trump said.

His concept of “good” is that it means “something Trump likes”.

“This alliance is a positive process; that’s my response to the American president. A stronger, more resilient, more sovereign Canada will be a more effective partner with the United States,” Carney told reporters at a news conference shortly after his speech.

“Canadians are united that nobody is going to tell us what language we speak, no one is going to dictate our culture or with whom we can strike agreements internationally,” he added.

You mean Trump is not the boss of the whole world?

What a concept.

Another way of looking at the Trump demolition of Kennedy Center thing is that it’s not one of his taunts but something he actually plans to do.

A new photo shows President Donald Trump eyeing a poster that appears to reference the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts being demolished, hours after he warned that the building “will end up being ripped down” if he is not properly recognized for his efforts to renovate it.

Rep. Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat battling Trump over his efforts to get his name affixed to the Kennedy Center, notified a federal judge Thursday morning in a court filing about the image and the president’s threat.

Not a taunt but a threat.

Beatty, a day earlier, asked Judge Christopher Cooper to schedule an emergency hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on what she says is the “unlawful” closure of the Kennedy Center by its board of trustees in violation of a prior order by Cooper.

In her filing Thursday, Beatty’s lawyers told Cooper, “Plaintiff files this Notice to apprise the Court of two new pieces of evidence that came to light last night.”

“First, yesterday evening, in response to reporter questions regarding the Kennedy Center project, President Trump stated, ‘for the Trump administration, for me, to get involved, and to take on long term, and to carry it, or to raise money to carry it, I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition,’” the filing said.

″‘Because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close, it will end up being ripped down,’” Trump had said, the lawyers noted.

Shame if something happened to it type of thing. It’s somehow magically going to close and magically be ripped down.

The attorneys added, “Separately, a photo has been circulated on social media depicting President Trump reading a placard on Air Force One that appears to read ‘Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.’”

Probably something Natalie Harp found for him.

The center’s closure came after Cooper on Tuesday rebuffed a new effort by the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees to honor Trump by putting his name on the center in recognition of planned renovations to the building. The board voted to close the center for renovations after Cooper issued his order.

Trump later Tuesday said the center would close immediately, and that planned renovations and reconstruction would not occur until Cooper’s initial ruling barring the addition of Trump’s name to the center was reversed by either a federal appeals court or the Supreme Court.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the photo.

In a statement Wednesday, Beatty’s lawyers said, “Closing the Kennedy Center without Judge Cooper’s approval appears to directly violate his order. This is an assault on the rule of law.″

“The board cannot simply ignore Judge Cooper’s rulings whenever it suits them. In this country, no one — including the president — is above the law,” the attorneys, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, said.

But if he can get away with it, then he is. So far no one has been able to stop him.

Toddler seen behaving like toddler on presidential airplane.

Trump was pictured reviewing a poster that appears to read, “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED,” hours before his administration told a judge the arts institution had to be closed due to “structural deterioration” it characterized as posing “untenable risks” to safety.

The images were captured through the window of Air Force One on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews as a dramatic legal battle plays out in court over the fate of the institution. CNN has reached out to the White House for comment on what Trump was reviewing and what exactly it said.

Educated guess: building falling apart, Trump savior, people who interfere with Trump demons.

The president had warned earlier Wednesday that the Kennedy Center would “end up being ripped down” without his support, adding, “It’s in very, very bad shape, very dangerous shape.”

It’s full of goblins and Democrats!

Hmm.

The first column lulls us into sort of agreeing, or at least not thinking our hair is on fire. The second takes advantage of that lull to pounce.

Wtf? Education as such, not particular forms or examples of educational practice but education itself, is a tool to further white supremacy? You’re going with that? You’re going with the claim that non-white people have no use for education? That education, all education, is racist and evil and to be rejected? Are you out of your minds?

All the rest of it is of course bonkers, empowered by the bonkers claim that education=white supremacy end of story.

Foreign Policy says Trump has lost his mojo.

Trump, now focused more on ballrooms and pools than on the Nobel Peace Prize he lobbied for just one year ago, only has himself to blame for prematurely morphing into something resembling a lame duck. The chief cause is surely his decision in February to go to war against Iran. More than six months in, the conflict has drained U.S. resources, raised the cost of living, and turned Trump into one of the most unpopular presidents in recorded history. 

Baffling, when wars of choice are usually so much fun.

Trump’s once loyal cabinet officials are now telling reporters that their boss ignored their concerns about attempting regime change in Iran.

The war has almost irreparably damaged Trump’s foreign-policy toolkit. Short on both offensive and defensive missiles, Trump can no longer dangle the possibility of changing battlefield dynamics in Ukraine, a conflict he promised to end in one day, or provide a suitable deterrent to China’s ambitions in Taiwan. The hard realities of a slow industrial base will severely constrain his ability to project power. Inflation, made worse first by tariffs and then by the war’s impact on gas prices, will stymie his decision-making at home and abroad. 

Yes but besides that…

The friendships Trump has chosen to trample on—from Canada to Europe to India—were in fact Washington’s secret sauce, the one thing Beijing couldn’t manufacture. In squandering those partnerships, Trump has accelerated the diffusion of U.S. power as well as the process of his own declining influence.

He had a lot of fun trampling though. That’s the important thing.

Easy for him to say.

It’s only women and girls after all. A nasty business, but not important.

But what are the real problems facing Britain? Not this.

No of course not, because “this” is only about female people. The importance of it, the problemishness of it, is automatically limited by the fact that it’s about people who don’t matter all that much – people not like Rory Stewart.

It gets nutser by the hour.

Simmering turmoil over the future of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts boiled over on Tuesday as the center abruptly closed to the public and President Trump threatened to cancel a planned $257 million renovation if his name was not returned to the front of the building.

Allies of Mr. Trump have been pushing for months to close the center for major renovations and to honor the president by affixing his name to its marble facade. A federal judge has blocked both efforts.

There is no reason to “honor” Trump by sticking his name on the building that honors an assassinated president. They might as well make a statue of Trump to sit on Lincoln’s knee at the Lincoln Memorial. The Kennedy Center is nothing to do with Trump, end of story.

On Tuesday, the center aggressively tested the judge’s order not to close by shutting its doors in what officials called an emergency action designed to protect people from deteriorating conditions inside the building. Shortly after 4:30 p.m., employees heard a sudden notice on the P.A. system: “The center is now closed to the public. Please exit the center by way of the Hall of States.”

That’s not testing the judge’s order, it’s ignoring it, flouting it, disobeying it.

The Kennedy Center said in a statement that an immediate temporary closure of the building was necessary for safety reasons but that an extended closure would begin once the court gives its approval. Earlier on Tuesday, the center’s Trump-allied board voted — for a third time — to close the building, citing a recent incident in which a five-foot-long section of ceiling plaster fell amid a storm.

But lawyers for Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democratic ex officio board member whose lawsuit is at the center of the court battle, signaled that they would view any closure as in direct conflict with a court order.

“If true,” the lawyers, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, said in a statement, “it would appear a direct violation of the court’s order and courting contempt.”

We’re not lawyers, so we can skip the “would appear” bit. It is a direct violation; couldn’t be much directer.

The Kennedy Center quickly filed a notice of appeal, and Mr. Trump responded on social media with a stark ultimatum. If an appeals court does not agree to allow his name back on the building, he said in the post, he would block the renovation of the center that he has been championing for more than a year.

“If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said in the post, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

He also said the building would close “immediately.”

Trump’s expertise is all we need to know.

According to Donald Trump, concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence technology – that “robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all” – are a hoax.

It’s the kind of language the US president typically reserves for the objects of his most intense derision – theories about human-driven climate change, investigations into Russian election-meddling, and the drives to impeach and remove him from office during his first presidential term.

Derision is one word for it; others are rage, fury, eruption.

Styling himself as the “hoax buster”, in a series of social media posts on Monday he issued a full-throated endorsement of what he called “the greatest economic development engine in history” and scorned those who doubted the benefits of the technology.

Well that will be because he knows nothing about it.

The ranks of doubters have been growing in recent weeks, however, amidst anxiety over the disruptive nature of AI – if not worries about potentially civilisation-threatening danger – among some industry insiders and politicians, including from within Trump’s own Republican Party.

And here’s the thing: they know something about it, and he doesn’t, and worse than that, he doesn’t know he doesn’t. He thinks he knows everything about everything. We know this from hearing him talk for the last (sob) eleven years.

None of that has deterred Trump, however, whose latest social media fusillade was only his latest effort to turn back growing AI scepticism through sheer force of will.

Because will is what he has instead of intelligence and the ability to take in what other people say. Will is a really really bad substitute for those two qualities.

“Congress under both Democratic and Republican control has been asleep at the wheel,” [Bernie Sanders] said. “And now we have a president whose ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing.”

According to Trump, however, what’s needed isn’t debate or new policies, it’s trust in his authority and judgement.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades,” he wrote. “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies.”

That’s a minor masterpiece of self-undermining. Zero intelligent people would ever refer to themselves as SMART (High IQ!).

Labour says men can be women.

TUC Motion 17 commits 5.3 million trade unionists to campaign for gender self-declaration. It never once uses the word “woman”. This is how a movement legislates over women’s rights while pretending not to see them.

Read Motion 17 as many times as you like. Count every line, every clause, every one of its two hundred-odd words. You will not find the word “woman” anywhere in it. Not once. Not “women,” not “sex,” not “female,” not “girls.” A motion built entirely around reversing the practical effect of a Supreme Court judgment about the meaning of sex under British equality law manages, across five resolutions and four sub-clauses of condemnation, never to mention the people that judgment was about.

I’m so tired of this blithe erasure of women. I’m so tired of this endless hostility and indifference and absolute determination to demolish our rights.

On Monday 14 September, delegates at the TUC Congress in Brighton carried Motion 17, “Oppose the EHRC Code of Practice (Services, Public Functions and Associations),” without a recorded opposing speaker and without, as far as any published account shows, a card vote. It came from the TUC’s LGBT+ Conference, was moved on the floor by Maria Exall of the Communication Workers’ Union, and was endorsed for the General Council by the TUC’s Assistant General Secretary, Kate Bell. It commits the entire trade union movement, nearly five and a half million working people, to campaign for the reintroduction of gender self-declaration into UK law. And it does so while treating the women whose legal protections are actually at stake as a subject too awkward to name.

Solidarity fornever, right? For the union makes us misogynists.

More of how ridiculous this fuss is.

Now the Government has a different solution in England to help children maintain a healthy diet: don’t give them a choice. New standards announced this week will further restrict fried, battered or breadcrumb-coated food; limit consumption of cakes and biscuits; apply restrictions to packed lunches; and demand high-protein meals, resulting in endless lentils and chickpeas, which are historically not English in the slightest.

Wtf? So what? Is there some rule or norm that says children can eat only food that is historically [relevant nationality here]? Lentils and chickpeas aka garbanzo beans are not so weird or gross that they can be eaten only by citizens of Legumeolandia. They’re a tad boring if cooked boringly, but then so are the everlasting fried potato sticks. With any luck the schools will serve the lentils in delicious curries and tomato sauces and similar.

Babyman tantrum due any minute.

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts could not honor President Trump with an inscription on the institution’s exterior, blocking an effort by the center’s board to restore the president’s name to the building.

“Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Judge Christopher R. Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington wrote in the order. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”

Yebbut he fixed it up! You gotta give him credit for that!!

The center first affixed the president’s name to the building in December, after its Trump-allied board voted to add it to the institution’s formal title in recognition for his role in securing $257 million for a sweeping renovation project.

In May, Judge Cooper ruled that the renaming as the Trump-Kennedy Center was unlawful and could only be decided by Congress, which had authorized the creation of the center and its dedication to President Kennedy. The judge ordered the letters spelling out the president’s name removed from the marble.

As it pursued an appeal, the center complied.

But last month its board voted to restore Mr. Trump’s name in a different form, aggressively testing the judge’s previous order. The resolution approved by the board proposed an inscription under the building’s main signage that would read “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump.”

Which is so dumb. It’s an interruption, a change of subject, an irrelevance. The memorial to Kennedy is a memorial because he was assassinated. Who came along and tidied it up 60+ years later is entirely beside the point.

Since the president took over the institution at the start of his second term, it has seen waves of cancellations by artists, plummeting attendance by audiences and withdrawal of support from some donors.

Well…ok…so can we put his name on it in recognition of that?

The board’s decision to recognize Mr. Trump with an inscription was an effort to find a workaround to a provision in the federal law governing the Kennedy Center that says “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas.”

There’s no room for a workaround there. Not so much as would let a flea get in.

Even the unions hate women.

#TUC Motion 17 commits 5.3 million union members to campaign for gender self-declaration, reversing a Supreme Court ruling on women’s sex-based rights. Refuges. Changing rooms. Prisons. Women-only spaces. All at stake. Yet the motion never once uses the word “woman”. Ask your union rep why.

Read Motion 17 as many times as you like. Count every line, every clause, every one of its two hundred-odd words. You will not find the word “woman” anywhere in it. Not once. Not “women,” not “sex,” not “female,” not “girls.” A motion built entirely around reversing the practical effect of a Supreme Court judgment about the meaning of sex under British equality law manages, across five resolutions and four sub-clauses of condemnation, never to mention the people that judgment was about.

That is not an oversight. It is the whole story.

New hatred of women just like the old hatred of women.

Trump is so mad at the Supreme Court.

Trump upbraided Supreme Court justices as “shells” beholden to “crazed” liberal interests in a lengthy online screed a day after the court blocked his plan to execute dramatic changes to mail-in voting ahead of the midterms.

“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.

They were supposed to side with him every single time no matter what! Surely they knew that. It’s all so shocking.

None of the justices Trump appointed to the court during his first term — Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett — noted disagreement with the majority opinion blocking the mail-voting changes.

Traitors!

Nothing to see here folks.

On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands.

…

That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

…

Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family.

Sound filthy at all?

National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection? 

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

But instead it’s not just thinkable but doable, and done. Filth times a thousand.