I’m curious about why “Sophie Molly” does this.

People mostly don’t bare their teeth like that when smiling, and they even more mostly don’t grit them like that. In other primates a gritted teeth grin like that is a threat response.

Maybe he thinks it makes him look more womany.… Read the rest

The metamorphosis of the Washington Post:

Longtime Washington Post writer Karen Attiah says she has been fired from the publication’s Opinions department for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.”

The Post, which has been overhauling the entire department, declined to comment on personnel matters. But Attiah’s Post biography has been revised to say she “was” a columnist, indicating she is no longer employed.

…

Attiah posted a string of messages about political violence in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week. She criticized what she called “empty rhetoric” denouncing violence that hasn’t been matched by actions.

One of her posts asserted that “part of what keeps America so violent is the

Trump speaks up for hatred.

Trump told a crowd of tens of thousands at a memorial for Charlie Kirk that he “hates” his opponents, despite Kirk’s widow saying she forgives the man charged with fatally shooting her husband.

The president gave the last of more than two dozen speeches at a public event that reflected on Kirk’s impact within the Make America Great Again movement. He said Kirk told a staff member he was not afraid of students who disagreed with him in the crowd at Utah Valley University. “I’m not here to fight them – I want them to know them and love them,” Trump quoted Kirk as saying.

But Trump said he felt differently to the

It sounds familiar…

Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh said she was injured Friday as a result of getting knocked to the ground by a U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agent.

The incident took place during a demonstration outside of the Broadview ICE detention facility near Chicago. Abughazaleh, a Democrat seeking to represent Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, posted a video on X, writing: “This is what it looks like when ICE violates our First Amendment rights.”

What ICE just did to me was a violent abuse of power — and it’s still nothing compared to what they’re doing to immigrant communities.

I’ve been fighting the right as a journalist and now I’m running for Congress to do the

The road to dictatorship:

Democrats on Sunday framed President Trump’s public demand that Attorney General Pam Bondi not “delay” in prosecutions of political enemies as a threat to American democracy.

I don’t think “framed” is the right word there. “Described” or “characterized” would be better. It’s not really all that controversial or debatable that a president leaning on an AG to prosecute people the president doesn’t like is not kosher. Is “not kosher” equivalent to “threat to democracy”? Good enough for government work, I’d say.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) argued on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that Trump is turning the DOJ “into an instrument that goes after his enemies, whether they’re guilty or not” and

So is Pam Bondi willing to be another John Mitchell?

Trump is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself…

Autocracies are headed by one man but require the cooperation of many others. Some collaborators may sincerely share the autocrat’s goals, but opportunists provide a crucial margin of support. In the United States, such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?

As Bondi makes her daily decisions

Trump wants his Attorney General to do something, so he yells at her in public on his personal social media toy.

He’s stupid but he can’t be so extremely stupid that he thinks this is normal and president-like and not at all cringe-worthy. So why does he do it? I suppose it’s because he doesn’t care about being cringe-worthy because we can’t get rid of him so why should he? So the libs think he’s childish and embarrassing and idiotic, so what?

CNN:

President Donald Trump increased pressure on Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring criminal charges against several political foes, calling her out by name Saturday as he noted he had reviewed statements critical over what he says

It’s complicated.

Trump continued his sweeping crackdown on immigration on Friday, turning his focus to a visa program for skilled foreign workers. He signed a proclamation that adds a $100,000 fee for new applicants for H-1B visas that allow foreign workers like software engineers a chance to be employed in the United States.

The H-1B visa is designed to help companies fill openings for which American workers with similar abilities cannot be found. But immigration hard-liners and far-right activists have long argued that the visa allows companies to replace American workers with foreign ones.

And, the Times inexplicably neglects to say, pay them less. It could be said that the H-1B visa is designed to help companies fill … Read the rest

No. This is one of the items they get so entirely wrong.

‘If you go down the biological route, you will uncover a minefield’

Liberal Democrats in England Former Chair Lucas North says the Liberal Democrats have been ‘very clear’ that the view of the party is ‘trans-women are women’. pic.twitter.com/JFWXrZMsPK

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 20, 2025

Starting at 1:07:

…and I think that recognizing that people know best who they themselves are and recognizing and taking at face value who someone says that they are is important and is the decent way to interact with other people.

In ordinary circumstances, yes, but it takes only a few seconds of thought to come up with exceptions.

These days, though, … Read the rest

Oh come on.

Mandatory sanctification of maga hero.

Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza”, with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a “modern civil rights leader”, or pay monthly fines.

Just stop. He wasn’t any kind of civil rights leader. He was a talker, an advocate, an activist of sorts, but not a civil rights leader. Civil rights leaders don’t tell some kinds of people they are subordinate to other kinds of people. That’s the opposite of civil rights leadership.

And then making it mandatory to throw up a statue of him on every … Read the rest

So very liberal and democratic.

The Lib Dem party conference has descended into a transgender row after members shut down a vote on biological men taking women’s roles.

Gender-critical activists had intended to force Sir Ed Davey into banning trans women from taking female positions with a debate and then vote on the issue. However, it was struck off the agenda after a rival campaigner warned it would be used to “legitimise bigotry”, calling the proponents an “extremist faction”.

Oh we’re the extremists. It’s extremist to know that men are not women, and not at all extremist to insist that men are women if they say they are and that women have no right to defend our own rapidly … Read the rest

Some Good Law Project blither from Jolyon:

A dangerous narrative that frames trans people as a threat to women has solidified its grip on public discourse in recent months. It’s a narrative built on fear, not facts, and it’s having devastating effects on the trans community.

It’s not a “narrative.” It’s trendy to sweep all the words into the category of “narrative” (except one’s own words of course) but it’s stupid and inaccurate and manipulative. It’s also not “framing.” Calling it “framing” implies manipulation at best, lying at worst.

We’re not telling a story when we point out that trans women are men and that men are barred from some women’s spaces for reasons of safety as well as … Read the rest

The NY Times reported a couple of weeks ago that rescuers in Afghanistan don’t rescue women.

The first rescue workers reached Bibi Aysha’s village more than 36 hours after an earthquake devastated settlements across eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous areas on Sunday. But instead of bringing relief, the sight of them heightened her fears; not a single woman was among them.

Afghan cultural norms, enforced even in emergencies by the ruling Taliban, forbid physical contact between men and women who are not family members. In the village of Andarluckak, in Kunar Province, the emergency team hurriedly carried out wounded men and children, and treated their wounds, said Ms. Aysha, 19. But she and other women and adolescent girls, some of them bleeding,

Are we seeing a pattern or no?

A top House Democrat on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of “systematically dismantling” efforts to prosecute sex crimes and hunt down traffickers, as the president faces continued pressure to make public investigative files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The memo from House judiciary committee ranking member Jamie Raskin and his staff, shared exclusively with the Guardian, said that beyond refusing the demands for transparency around Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, Trump has also undercut efforts to hold people accused of similar crimes accountable by “systematically dismantling the offices and programs we rely on to combat human trafficking and prosecute sex crimes”.

Are we sure it’s systematically as … Read the rest

Look, this isn’t complicated. Either you do what Trump tells you to do, or ya fiyad. It’s that simple.

The U.S. attorney investigating New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey said he had resigned on Friday, hours after President Trump called for his ouster.

Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation. Mr. Trump has long viewed Ms. James and Mr. Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law

Ted Cruz dissents.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on Friday for threats he made this week related to Jimmy Kimmel’s show, calling the Trump administration official’s actions “dangerous as hell.”

“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said on his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”

“I like Brendan Carr. He’s a good guy, he’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him, but what he said there is dangerous as hell,”

There are interns being thrown over the bannisters in the White House this evening. Judge tells Trump to redo his lawsuit so that it’s not so tedious and moronic.

A federal judge tossed Donald Trump’s $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, book publisher Penguin and two Times reporters, and said the suit was filled with “vituperation and invective” and violated civil procedure in federal cases for failing to get to the point.

So one has to wonder why Trump’s lawyers didn’t tell him that instead of letting him make a fool of himself? Sabotage?

Anyway, the Guardian account is a treat.

[Judge]Merryday cited Rule 8(a) of the federal rules of civil procedure requiring a complaint include a

We won’t tell you.

A new transparency row has emerged as the fallout from the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal row continues.

The Herald can reveal that health chiefs have refused to reveal another key piece of information regarding how the legal fees are covered.

It was revealed on Wednesday that the Central Legal Office (CLO), which is part of the NHS’s National Service Scotland unit, and appoints barristers on behalf of health boards, said there was “no legitimate” case to reveal the hourly rate paid to Jane Russell KC.

No legitimate case? Really? For people to know how much of their money is being pissed away on pretending a man is a woman?

However, the CLO -which is a

Why does it surprise anyone that the Neville Chamberlain approach doesn’t work any better with Trump than it did with Hitler?

Late last year, ABC News spent $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit with President Donald Trump. At the time, you could squint and see the business sense of it: Just pay up, say you’re sorry and this will all blow over.

Or, pay up, say you’re sorry, and next time the demand will be much higher. Which is more likely?

Across Corporate America, companies are learning the hard way that giving Trump what he wants won’t appease him — it will only stoke his appetite. (It seems some folks have forgotten the sage wisdom underpinning Laura Joffe Numeroff’s

September 10:

Texas A&M University swiftly fired a lecturer and removed two administrators after a student filmed herself arguing with the instructor that a children’s literature course broke the law because the coursework recognized more than two genders.

The student cited President Trump, who has signed an executive order saying his administration would push for the recognition of only two genders. After the video taken by the student was posted on social media, Republican politicians in the state, including the governor, demanded quick action from the public university, accusing the instructor of “blatantly indoctrinating students in gender ideology.”

The school’s moves were condemned by advocates of academic freedom, who say they reflected a state that was veering into authoritarianism