Evil Don is mad at Pompeo.

Trump has fumed for weeks that Pompeo is responsible for hiring State Department officials whose congressional testimony threatens to bring down his presidency, the officials said. The president confronted Pompeo about the officials — and what he believed was a lackluster effort by the secretary of state to block their testimony — during lunch at the White House on Oct. 29, those familiar with the matter said.

Inside the White House, the view was that Trump “just felt like, ‘rein your people in,’” a senior administration official said.

Right, because that’s how everything works. It’s all personal, and it’s all about the guy at the top reining in the peons, and various guys … Read the rest

Trump is a big fan of torture, provided it’s the US doing it.

Trump has held the same views about war crimes and torture for years — and being commander in chief has not changed him. He believes that previous presidents have been far too eager to send Americans to war, but that once they’ve been deployed, these soldiers should be free to treat enemies brutally.

• Trump’s views on this subject flared up again last week. He clashed with Pentagon brass when he cleared three soldiers who have been accused or convicted of war crimes.
• Pentagon leaders had privately argued that the president’s intervention in these cases would undercut the code of military justice.

Trump has told advisers that

Books by Selina Todd (she’s a historian):

Young Women, Work, and Family in England, 1918-1950, Oxford University

Winner, Women’s History Network Book Prize ‘Young women emerge in this history as a critically important force…When we imagine a typical interwar worker, it isn’t as a bob-haired 14-year-old shop assistant wearing her first pair of heels’. LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 

The People. The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 2014Book of the Year in Observer and Guardian; one of David Kynaston’s Books of the Year; one of only three history books by women to be a bestseller in 2014. Now translated into Japanese, Korean, Catalan and Spanish.

Tastes of Honey: the making of Shelagh Delaney and a cultural

The headline:

Palatine School District Approves Full Bathroom Rights For Transgender Students

Had transgender students been denied “full bathroom rights” until now? What are “full bathroom rights” anyway? Do students who are not transgender still have them at Palatine School District?

The suburban high school district at the center of a national debate over transgender student rights voted Thursday night to gives its transgender students full access to school locker rooms and bathrooms.

So they can go into all of them? While students who are not transgender have to pick those for girls or those for boys?

The debate over transgender student access started four years ago when a student charged that the district’s practices discriminated against transgender students. The

Nick Robinson of the BBC tweeted a few days ago:

Should the law treat me as a woman if I chose to identify as one? Yes @lucianaberger
of the @LibDems told me on @BBCr4today despite criticism by some women that their rights are being ignored.

Jolyon Maugham QC commented about this wrongthink about self ID. (More on this post.)

A woman replied to Maugham:

If Nick says he’s a woman that doesn’t mean he is. The Lib Dem’s would believe and treat him as a woman. That is ludicrous.

Maugham QC:

If Nick says it he’d be lying. Which is why his tweet is so reductive, and loaded.

Oh. He would? How does Maugham QC know … Read the rest

Humanists UK warns against a stealth evangelical campaign disguised as Xmas presents for children in need:

Schools are being warned not to support the Operation Christmas Child appeal run by an evangelical US charity Samaritan’s Purse, which unbeknownst to many parents uses donors’ gifts to evangelise to vulnerable children, after it emerged that more schools are collecting donations for the scheme.

Operation Christmas Child sends shoeboxes full of toys, books, and other shiny presents to vulnerable children in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. But alongside the packages put together by schools, the charity also adds religious literature which aims to convert children to Christianity.

Can you say “strings attached”? Can you say “sneaky godbothering shits”?

Today it has emerged that 

Jane Clare Jones:

The most notable thing here – other than 50, 000 some ppl liking a dude saying ‘fuck those evil witches’- is how many read it as identical to an affirmation of trans rights. This is how the discourse is structured. Being pro-trans is signaled, above all, by being anti-TERF.

The tweet she is commenting on is alas by Adam Savage, the Mythbusters guy. I saw it yesterday and sighed and moved on.

TERFs are shit. https://twitter.com/charliejane/status/1195156950394097665

It’s all women’s fault, as usual. Radical feminist women “are shit.”… Read the rest

A student residence in Bolton goes up like a torch.

Firefighters have been tackling a huge blaze at a university student accommodation block.

Crowds of students were evacuated from The Cube in Bolton when the fire broke out at about 20:30 GMT on Friday.

At its height about 200 firefighters from 40 fire engines were tackling the blaze which was affecting every floor.

A witness said the fire was “climbing up” the six-storey building. One person was rescued by crews using an aerial platform.

@JoLiptrott tweeted a Guardian article from last year about Grenfell-type cladding on student residences:

Thousands of students arriving at university for freshers’ week face sleeping in high-rise accommodation wrapped in combustible Grenfell-style cladding, the

@AirdalePhil tweets:

… Read the rest

Charles Pierce at Esquire says goodbye to Roger Stone’s career as a ratfucker.

On Friday, during a recess in the committee hearings into one of his former boss’s other abuses of power, Stone was convicted on all seven counts on which he’d been called to the bar, and no sartorial cock-of-the-walk narcissism can save him this time.

I remember being nauseated watching him get treated like a star at the Republican National Convention in 2016, and even more deeply nauseated watching him gallivant around the Capitol dressed like Mr. Peanut’s evil twin during the inauguration that same year.

…

Moreover, to those of us who have followed politics for a while now, watching Roger Stone go to the sneezer