It’s official.

Canada’s federal court has ruled that an asylum agreement the country has with the US is invalid because America violates the human rights of refugees.

The Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), in place since 2004, requires refugee claimants to request protection in the first safe country they reach.

But on Wednesday, a judge declared the deal unconstitutional due to the chance that the US will imprison the migrants.

In other words refugees who tried to go from the US to Canada were being turned back at the border on the grounds that they were already in that “first safe country.” Lawyers for refugees pointed out that what they were already in was not safe.

Nedira Jemal Mustefa,

Behold the violent anarchists!

A new ad for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign used an image of pro-democracy protests in Ukraine from 2014 to show what it called “chaos & violence” in the US.

The ad, published on Tuesday, includes a photo of the president listening to police leaders next to another photo appearing to show a group of protesters attacking a police officer on the ground.

“Public safety vs chaos & violence,” the text underneath the photos says.

LOL

a new Trump ad warning of chaos & violence depicts a cop being attacked by protesters…

…only it's a pic from Kyiv in 2014, when Yanukovich's thugs fought to quash a democratic uprising.https://t.co/VfJujT50Lm pic.twitter.com/QBrlwauo6s

— Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) July

From Pliny:

Click to embiggen.… Read the rest

Trump’s ambassador to the UK is also being investigated for saying sexist and racist shit. What a surprise.

Diplomats told investigators that Johnson made remarks — often casually bandied about — that they found deeply offensive and demoralizing, sources said.

In 2018, ahead of an event for Black History Month — commonly marked at US embassies around the world — Johnson appeared agitated and asked if the audience would be “a whole bunch of Black people,” according to one source.

Three sources said Johnson questioned why the Black community would want a separate month to celebrate Black history and argued that Black fathers didn’t remain with their families and that was the “real challenge.” One source said an official

Biden thinks Trump is the first racist president.

Dude.

“We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has,” Trump’s Democratic challenger said, the Washington Post reports.

No he’s not.

The “peculiar institution” loomed large over the first few decades of American presidential history. Not only did enslaved laborers help build the White House all of the earliest presidents (except for John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams) owned enslaved people. George Washington kept some 300 bondsmen at his Mount Vernon plantation. Thomas Jefferson—despite once calling slavery an “assemblage of horrors”—owned at least 175 enslaved workers at one time. James Madison, James Monroe and Andrew

Jane Clare Jones nailing things down:

This argument is not, therefore, an appeal for empathy with the damage done to us by male power and projection, by the immemorial and immovable demand that we efface ourselves before the needs of more important others. We know our pain doesn’t count in your economy, that it only registers on your balance books as a sly deceptive weapon or a vicious wilful harm to the interests of the only kind of people given credit. That you’re so certain of the justness of your accounting, you never seem to notice, that this one obvious fact, gives the lie to the ‘validity’ of your catechism. If you really thought that they were women, their

Trump did a coronavirus briefing yesterday.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, thank you very much, and good afternoon.  Today, I want to provide an update on our response to the China virus and what my administration is doing to get the outbreak in the Sun Belt under control.  It seems largely in Sun Belt but could be spreading.

First sentence in and he goes with “China virus.” We should start calling him the Queens virus.

He says they’re all very sad about the virus.

My administration will stop at nothing to save lives and shield the vulnerable, which is so important. 

Oh? That will make a change. They’ve stopped at a fuck of a lot of thing up to now. They’ve … Read the rest

A couple of days ago a Republican congressional representative, John Yoho, called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “disgusting” to her face and then as he was walking away said aloud “fucking bitch.”

Today he staged a…what to call it…a resentful “explanation,” a weepy self-justification, a passive-aggressive attack claiming to be an apology.

“I cannot apologize for my passion” — @RepTedYoho’s “apology” to AOC pic.twitter.com/Bh30Phu8zp

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 22, 2020

AOC said that was not any kind of apology.

In his floor speech, Yoho apologized for the “the abrupt manner of the conversation I had with my colleague from New York,” but he denied calling Ocasio-Cortez “disgusting” and a “fucking bitch,” as the Hill reported.

The “abrupt manner”? Abrupt? Dude, … Read the rest

Trump has been saying Biden wants to “abolish the suburbs” and Biden has been responding that that’s horseshit. (Possibly not his exact wording.)

Trump has largely focused on an Obama-era rule intended to combat historic racial discrimination in housing. The president has said he could be releasing his plan for replacing the rule any day now.

“Replacing” here means “reversing” or “nullifying.”

It’s another instance of Trump implicitly using race in his campaign pitch, which he’s also been doing explicitly on other issues. In this instance, the president appears to be using a policy to fight housing segregation in an attempt to scare white voters about outsiders coming into their neighborhoods. On Friday, he said that Democrats want

Dana Milbank points out an inconsistency in Trump’s Lawnorder ideology:

Trump said Sunday that federal police have been mobilized in Portland, Ore., (against the wishes of state and local authorities) to “protect Federal property” from “anarchists and agitators” — two years after Trump pardoned two men serving sentences for arson that burned 139 acres of federal property in Oregon in a case that inspired armed militias to seize federal land.

Oh yes, that pardon for destroying that federal property. Remember that?

Over and over during a 41-day armed standoff that terrified many locals, leader Ammon Bundy listed his demands: hand ownership of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge over to local ranchers and free two men convicted of starting fires that

Trump tried to get the fat cat he made ambassador to the UK to muscle the UK government to muscle the British Open to spend its money at Trump’s golf resort. That’s a lot of levels of trying to muscle people to send money his way for a vulgarian from Queens.

The American ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, told multiple colleagues in February 2018 that President Trump had asked him to see if the British government could help steer the world-famous and lucrative British Open golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, according to three people with knowledge of the episode.

Why would the British government want to do anything so corrupt and sleazy and … Read the rest

Trump likes the fascist suppression of protests so much that he’s doing more of it.

Homeland Security officials said Monday they are making preparations to deploy federal agents to Chicago, while President Trump threatened to send U.S. law enforcement personnel to other Democratic-led cities experiencing spates of crime.

It’s up to governors to get medical supplies during a pandemic, but it’s up to the feds to police selected cities (the ones with too many black people and too many people who vote for the Democrats).

Trump made the pronouncement as he defended his administration’s use of force in Portland, Ore., where agents have clashed nightly with protesters and made arrests from unmarked cars. Calling the unrest there “worse than

This is so infuriating.

Lots of us, sometimes including me, could find @HillaryClinton’s exactitude and rigorously on-message presence to be not only annoying but suspect. Well, politics is about timing and context, and in #TrumpWorld chaos, it’s a tonic of good sense to hear her on @JoyAnnReid’s show.

— howardfineman (@howardfineman) July 20, 2020

Oh no, she’s too exact! She’s too good at talking about what she’s talking about and not something else! (Flowers? Babies? Baby flowers?) She’s too competent! Ewwwwwwwwwww. Women like that are gross, and we’re suspicious of them, because they might just find something better to do than flatter and placate us. In short they’re bitches.

When men do anger at work they’re seen … Read the rest

Well, he denies it, but the reporter says he heard it, and another Rep doesn’t deny it but rather says he was thinking about other things.

A Republican lawmaker challenged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on issues of crime and policing in an unusual — and decidedly personal — confrontation on the Capitol steps, saying she was "disgusting" and a "f-cking bitch." https://t.co/SNMeZaNO7s

— The Hill (@thehill) July 21, 2020

!!My colleague Mike saw @RepTedYoho accost @RepAOC at Capitol today for her suggestion poverty & unemployment are driving NYC spike in crime amid COVID.

Yoho: "You are out of your freaking mind."

AOC told Yoho he was being "rude."

Then parting ways, Yoho said: "F*cking bitch."

— Olivia Beavers (@Olivia_Beavers) July 21,

Trump just can’t catch a break. Chris Wallace of Fox News asked him at the end of his interview the other day how he sees his presidency.

“I think I was very unfairly treated,” Trump responded. “From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.”

Well…but…I mean…a presidency isn’t primarily about the mood of the president, it’s about bigger things. I don’t think Wallace was asking “has it been fun for you?”

Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man. He is so gripped by his grievances, such a prisoner of his resentments, that even the most benevolent question from an interviewer—what good parts of

That was fun! Power went out here at 4:12 a.m. and stayed out for just over 7 hours.

On the plus side, I got to watch a couple of tree workers cut down a very tall dead evergreen tree in the next block. They cut off the branches from bottom to near the top, lowering the bigger ones on ropes and dropping the smaller ones. Then they cut off the tops, with a few small branches left, by tying them up then making two cuts then pushing. Then they repeat that process all the way back down the tree.

One of the two on this job is a woman. I’m impressed.… Read the rest

Action misogyny:

The man authorities have said attacked the family of a federal judge, leaving her husband wounded and her son dead, had previously called her “a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama,” and had fantasized about raping a different female judge who presided over his divorce case, NBC News reported.

A review of thousands of pages of self-published writing by Roy Den Hollander, an anti-feminist lawyer, found threats of retribution against the “feminazi infestation of government institutions” and the “feminist infested American judicial system,” NBC reported. The lawyer “was active in anti-feminist and misogynist groups on Facebook, including groups titled Humanity Vs. Feminism and Men Going Their Own Way, according to an analysis of accounts

I did wonder why they did the interview outside, in DC in July. I grew up in New Jersey, and summers there are steamy; DC is worse. It turns out it was Trump’s idea.

“Hot enough for you here, Mr President?” asked Chris Wallace.

“It’s hot,” said Trump. “It’s about, well, sort of almost record-breaking stuff.”

“You know, we wanted to do it inside,” replied Wallace. “This is your choice.”

Maybe he thinks outside looks good on him. It doesn’t. (Also, those chairs – he looked ridiculous on his chair, all bunched up.)

He claimed that people flying the confederate flag were “not talking about racism”. But when asked about removing the names of confederate generals from US

Trump says hell yes he’s going to keep sending the feds in to trample on protesters’ rights.

#BREAKING: President Trump says he may send "more federal law enforcement" to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, and other cities to deal with unrest: "In Portland they’ve done a fantastic job." pic.twitter.com/Pe6aDv6AVt

— The Hill (@thehill) July 20, 2020

Speaking in the Oval Office, the president brushed aside claims the officers are depriving people of their constitutional rights, and concerns such deployments could herald an attempt by Trump to rule without Congress.

Because he recognizes no legitimate limit on his power to do what he wants, because that’s who he is. It always has been.

In Portland, local media

That figures.

The Trump administration has been consulting the former government lawyer who wrote the legal justification for waterboarding on how the president might try to rule by decree.

John Yoo told the Guardian he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders on whether to apply existing federal laws.

Aka Trump’s view all along: he should be able to do whatever he wants.

Constitutional scholars and human rights activists have also pointed to the deployment of paramilitary federal forces against protesters in Portland as a sign that Trump is ready to use this broad interpretation of presidential powers as a means