Gordon Sondland suddenly remembered he’d got it exactly opposite. Gosh he’ll forget his own name next! Isn’t memory a funny thing!

Gordon Sondland, President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, reversed himself in new testimony to House impeachment investigators, saying he does believe military aid for Ukraine was contingent upon the launch of politically motivated probes.

In his revised statement, Sondland said he told a top Ukrainian official on Sept. 1 that hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the beleaguered U.S. ally would “likely” be held up unless the government announced investigations of Trump’s political rivals.

Oh well fortunately it wasn’t a crucial point in the impeachment inquiry, no more significant than what color socks he … Read the rest

Marks and Spencer recently announced a “gender-neutral” policy for its changing rooms. Quite a few women objected; some of them wrote to M&S directly. Rose George is one:

A response from @marksandspencer about their awful decision to refuse to guarantee single-sex changing facilities to women and girls. Pretty much identical to what they tweeted @JeanHatchet

And my response.

Just look at that pathetic mess. “As a business, we strive to be inclusive and therefore, we allow customers the choice of which fitting room they feel comfortable to use, in respect of how they identify themselves.” But not “in respect of” what they really are and how vulnerable they may be to spying creeping perving men if they can’t have … Read the rest

Yovanovitch was in terrible danger in Ukraine – danger from Trump’s Twitter.

On 24 April this year, she received a call from Carol Perez, the director general of the foreign service, speaking to her in cryptic tones as if Yovanovitch’s life was in danger if she remained at her ambassadorial post in Kyiv. She spoke as if there was a threat too awful to describe clearly on a phone line.

“She said that there was a lot of concern for me, that I needed to be on the next plane home to Washington,” Yovanovitch recalled in her testimony to the congressional committees conducting impeachment hearings. Taken aback, the ambassador to Ukraine wanted to know what the sudden panic was

Charles Pierce at Esquire has been reading the transcript of Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony, and has learned that Sean Hannity was helping Trump tell lies about her.

Schiff: And did you ever find out when, you know, the allegations were being made or the attacks were being made by Donald Trump, Jr., or Rudy Giuliani, did you ever find out what the Secretary of State’s position, whether the Secretary of State was going to defend you or not, apart from the refusal by the Secretary to issue a statement in your defense?

Yovanovitch: What I was told by Phil Reeker was that the Secretary or perhaps somebody around him was going to place a call to Mr. Hannity on Fox

Back in August I did a couple of posts about cricket player Maxine Blythin. I missed the news a month later:

🏆 | What a season she’s had!

Your 2019 Kent Women Player of the Year is…. Maxine Blythin!

What a season indeed! Taking a woman’s place on the team and then taking an award from a woman.

One poignant reply a few minutes ago:

I teach at a girls’ school in Kent. We’ve had speakers in from Kent cricket to encourage the girls to view cricket as a sport for them. I guess that was all just a lie.

Oh not at all, girls can still play, they just have to be prepared for boys to be … Read the rest

Garrett Epps points out:

Trump has, one way or another, changed our national life irrevocably. When one side of a political struggle has shown itself willing to commit crimes, collaborate with foreign powers, destroy institutions, and lie brazenly about facts readily ascertainable to anyone, should the other side—can the other side—then pretend these things did not happen?

Some Democratic leaders are proclaiming that we can go back to the world before Trump—and before Brett Kavanaugh and Mitch McConnell, before Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani, before an invasion of a secure facility at the Capitol, before babies were torn from their mothers and caged, before racist rhetoric from the White House and massacres at a synagogue and an El

Sorry to cite the Daily Mail, but you know how it is – sometimes the quality papers are looking fixedly in the other direction.

A birth coach has been ‘ostracised’ by her professional organisation after transgender activists branded as offensive a Facebook post in which she said that only women can have babies.

Lynsey McCarthy-Calvert, 45, was forced to stand down as spokesperson for Doula UK and has since resigned altogether from the national organisation for birth coaches. Her exit comes after transgender rights activists triggered an investigation in which Doula UK concluded her message breached its equality and diversity guidelines.

What equality and diversity guidelines are those then? Ones that say men can have babies? Is there a … Read the rest

So the Trump people threw a Halloween party for staff and their kids.

A Halloween party on Oct. 25 at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building featured candy, paper airplanes and — concerning for some attendees — a station where children were encouraged to help “Build the Wall” with their own personalized bricks.

Photos of the children’s mural with the paper wall were provided to Yahoo News.

The party, which took place inside the office building used by White House staff, included the families of executive-branch employees and VIP guests inside and outside government.

…

The “Build the Wall” mural was on the first floor, outside the speechwriter’s office and next to the office of digital strategy and featured red paper

Do we believe in magic? Jolyon Maugham QC again:

To construct an argument around that because a man raped a women in a women’s prison it follows that trans women as a class pose a risk to women in prison is plain and simple bigotry of a type applied to eg black men, gay men, rape victims, jews etc etc

A reply:

No it’s not – TW are male – we want to exclude males from female only spaces like prisons. Unless it’s bigoted to have any female only spaces, any female only anything.

Jolyon QC:

That’s what, sadly, so many of these replies come to. That you have the right to define someone else’s identity and treat

Amy Hamm tweets:

So @MorganeOgerBC wants women to drown in the ocean and this trans activist outside #GIDYVR wants to behead women.

The Sunday Times reports:

A female prisoner who was allegedly sexually assaulted in jail by a male-bodied transgender inmate has launched a High Court action for a judicial review of government policy.

She says the transgender woman, who is serving a sentence for rape of a female, groped her breasts in the prison toilets. Shortly after the assault, the victim was moved to a different prison only to find her assailant had also moved there and would be sharing accommodation.

She is challenging the lawfulness of the government decision to place trans-women prisoners convicted of sexual and violent offences against women in women’s prisons without, it is claimed, adequately protecting female prisoners.

…

The claim says the government’s national

From The Postmillenial late yesterday:

Word spread quickly on social media this evening that Simon Fraser University has backed out of its decision to host the event entitled “#GIDYVR: How Media Bias Shapes the Gender Identity Debate” on November 2nd.

In addition to Vancouver feminist Meghan Murphy, the event was slated to feature Quillette Canadian editor Jonathan Kay and The Post Millennial contributor Anna Slatz, and was co-organized by Mark Collard, an SFU professor of anthropology, Amy Eileen Hamm, Holly Stamer, and GIDYVR. Free speech activist Lindsay Shepherd was set to moderate.

Amy tweeted four hours ago:

We are not cancelled. New venue will be announced in an hour.

An hour later, as promised:

#GIDYVR #NOTcancelled

If … Read the rest