Deb Haaland on the voter suppression in North Dakota:

On Oct. 9, our U.S. Supreme Court green-lighted voter suppression of Native Americans in North Dakota in a move that should outrage all of us. It comes just two short years after the Native American environmental movement skyrocketed into the national spotlight through the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. Now, those same Water Protectors are under attack again.

As a Pueblo Indian woman, I traveled to North Dakota and stood with the Water Protectors to protect land and water. Now, I support them and Native Americans across North Dakota as they organize to keep their right to vote during a contentious election

Hangin’ with Hannah:

https://twitter.com/HannahMouncey/status/1054208545812434944

https://twitter.com/HannahMouncey/status/1054210534390685696

https://twitter.com/HannahMouncey/status/1054211818535546880

https://twitter.com/HannahMouncey/status/1054509307897638912

Awww – sister!… Read the rest

Oh no.

They murdered his Dad, dismembered his body, orchestrated a cover-up, lied about the murder, then lied about the cover-up…and now are forcing Khashoggi's son, who is a captive in his own country, to participate in a photo-op shaking hands with the prince who murdered his Dad. https://t.co/LfEym9CxAR

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) October 23, 2018

Business Insider:

The son of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi was pictured with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the man widely believed to have orchestrated the journalist’s death.

The state-run Saudi Press Agency reported that Khashoggi’s son, Salah Khashoggi, met the king and crown prince on Tuesday in Riyadh.

…

The journalist had four adult children, all of whom

There was this guy on a plane in Barcelona the other day.

Police say they have identified a man filmed racially abusing an elderly woman on a Ryanair flight.

The woman, Delsie Gayle, 77, said she had been left stunned and depressed after a man shouted at her to move seats as they boarded a plane last Friday.

In footage shared on social media, Gayle’s daughter tries to stand up to the man and tells him her mother is disabled. The man says he does not care “whether she’s fucking disabled or not. If I tell her to get out, she gets out”.

I watched the clip a couple of days ago; it’s horrible.

In the footage, the

Speaking of gender and stupid rules about gender and stupid cruel bullying about stupid rules about gender – a thread.

https://twitter.com/DaddyFiles/status/1054527579204530176

https://twitter.com/DaddyFiles/status/1054527834121736193

https://twitter.com/DaddyFiles/status/1054528067601948675

https://twitter.com/DaddyFiles/status/1054528220727558144

Kids do that. I suppose it’s part of the process of learning to live in the social world – they police each other and are policed in turn. It’s awful.… Read the rest

Trump thinks women don’t get enough shit yet, he wants to make sure they get more.

The Trump administration is expected to soon issue regulations that would expand religious and moral exemptions for covering birth control in employer health insurance plans, a move that critics say would limit women’s access to contraception.

“a move that critics say would limit women’s access to contraception” – why do news outlets say stupid things like that? Of course it would limit women’s access to contraception, by definition; if you remove an item from insurance coverage, then access to that item becomes limited. That’s like saying if you cut workers’ pay then workers have less money.

The exact details of the exemptions, and

I saw a thing today. I was out in the neighborhood, walking to and fro in the world and up and down in it; it’s very foggy here so there is heavy condensation on the bushes and trees and everything else. What happens when there’s condensation like that? You see how many spider webs there are everywhere. I stopped to look at one, because a spider web beaded in condensation is a damn pretty thing, and I looked so closely that I noticed a thing new to me. Webs have long radial lines, like spokes, and short lines between them. At the sides of the web, but not top and bottom, the short lines make a Y – they have … Read the rest

This is a thing from October last year but I’m curious about it. A friend posted it on Facebook yesterday (probably not noticing the date – it happens to all of us), and there are a lot of angry comments and a lot of comments saying it looks fake. My reaction when first reading it was it’s fake. I still think it’s fake. I’m curious about what others think.

A daycare center received this letter. This is trump’s America. 😥😡

The text of the letter:

Hello I am writing this as a concerned parent and friend!

So most of us noticed you have a black girl working for the daycare. Our problem is she’s too dark most of the

Aaron Blake at the Post points out that Trump’s abject hero-worship of dictators is a tell:

President Trump has once again given away the game on Saudi Arabia and his reverence for authoritarians. But his soft stance on the Saudis’ killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi also betrays this irony: By going easy on them, he’s conceding his own weakness.

Despite ostensibly putting pressure on Saudi Arabia this weekend to come clean, Trump in an interview with The Post’s Josh Dawsey seemed to marvel at that same government’s ability to snuff out unrest.

“He’s seen as a person who can keep things under check,” Trump said of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “I mean that in

Jelani Cobb on the resurgence of voter suppression:

Decades ago, amid the most overt privations of Jim Crow, African-Americans used to tell a joke about a black Harvard professor who moves to the Deep South and tries to register to vote. A white clerk tells him that he will first have to read aloud a paragraph from the Constitution. When he easily does so, the clerk says that he will also have to read and translate a section written in Spanish. Again he complies. The clerk then demands that he read sections in French, German, and Russian, all of which he happens to speak fluently. Finally, the clerk shows him a passage in Arabic. The professor looks at it

Maureen Dowd on the role of Saudi bribery:

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, presidential libraries and foundations, politically connected private equity groups, P.R. firms, think tanks, universities and Trump family enterprises are awash in Arab money. The Saudis satisfy American greed, deftly playing their role as dollar signs in robes.

I’ve long thought there should be a great deal more reporting on this.

Donald Trump, who may be the only person more fond of lavish displays of arriviste gilt than the Saudis, is bedazzled by a Saudi pledge to buy billions worth of American weapons, just as he was flattered by the Saudi sword dance and weird luminescent orb séance on his visit to the kingdom.

Bedazzled and flattered and utterly … Read the rest

The president of the US engaged in active, blatant, highly visible voter suppression.

All levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD, including during EARLY VOTING. Cheat at your own peril. Violators will be subject to maximum penalties, both civil and criminal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2018

… Read the rest

Trump is pretending to believe the Saudis.

President Trump broke with his own intelligence agencies on Friday, appearing to accept Saudi Arabia’s explanationthat the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed by accident during a fistfight, while the United States’ spy agencies are increasingly convinced that he was assassinated on high-level orders from the Saudi royal court.

A fistfight for godsake. Right because journalists in their 50s always fling themselves into fistfights with 15 or 18 young beefy hit men and get accidentally beheaded as a result.

The growing evidence that Mr. Khashoggi, a Virginia resident and a columnist for The Washington Post, was killed on orders from the Saudi royal family has put Mr. Trump in an increasingly untenable

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1053334095114182657

Not a good analogy. Nobody is saying trans people shouldn’t compete in sport at all, some people are saying male-bodied people shouldn’t compete against women. Nobody is saying trans people are non-human animals. Nobody is saying trans people should be rounded up and sent to camps. Feminist women are not comparable to Nazis.

This impasse is one reason I can’t see most trans activism as genuinely progressive: it’s so resolutely blind and indifferent to the vulnerabilities and disadvantages of anyone else. Another way of putting it would be that it’s so unintersectional. A progressive trans activism would give a shit about any physical advantages trans women might have over women. It wouldn’t callously wave that off and carry … Read the rest

Talk about voter suppression…

At a time when many rural towns are slowly dying, the arrival of two massive meatpacking plants boosted Dodge City’s economy and transformed its demographics as immigrants from Mexico and other countries flooded in to fill those jobs.

Dodge City, Kansas, this is.

But the city located 160 miles (257 kilometers) west of Wichita has only one polling site for its 27,000 residents. Since 2002, the lone site was at the civic center just blocks from the local country club — in the wealthy, white part of town. For this November’s election, local officials have moved it outside the city limits to a facility more than a mile from the nearest bus stop, citing road

I saw a tweet from Nazir Afzal:

Restrictions lifted so you can learn about the latest grooming trials in Huddersfield
My interviews will be broadcast

This was not the work of Tommy Robinson & his cohorts, his lot nearly derailed it again

It was the bravery of victims & professionals

https://t.co/Vfn9KFQWig

— nazir afzal (@nazirafzal) October 19, 2018

So I read the BBC report.

Twenty men have been found guilty of being part of a grooming gang that raped and abused girls as young as 11 in Huddersfield.

The men were convicted of more than 120 offences against 15 girls.

Victims were plied with drink and drugs and then “used and abused at will” in a seven-year “campaign of

Jane Clare Jones on ontological totalitarianism:

When I first encountered trans ideology about six years ago, it never occurred to me in a million years that the academy would just roll over for this pile of cobbled-together, anti-materialist, life-denying, patriarchal, bullying bullshit and ask it to tickle its tummy. The whole thing is a reality distortion cognitive dissonance machine. It’s an exercise in mass gaslighting that relies on a concatenation of double-thinks. And I had supposed, naively it turns out, that the people who are paid to think about things, would, y’know, think. Quite why it has prompted not inquiry, but compliance, is complex. It has, in the first instance, a lot to do with a catastrophically clay-headed