Oh hey, we here in the Northwest have the dirtiest air in the country (well somebody has to) and the worst air on record ever, at least for Seattle.

This probably comes as no surprise, but Washington has the worst air quality in the country today thanks to wildfire #smoke. Conditions improve slightly tomorrow #wawx pic.twitter.com/8jOiUesIaC

— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) August 15, 2018

Also? Hottest summer ever.

Record broken or broken record? The all-time record for number of 85°+ degree days in a year was set Tuesday in Seattle. The previous record was set in 2017. Oh, it's also only August 15th… #WAwx pic.twitter.com/CLBLASWPAc

— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) August 15, 2018

Normally I can see 60 miles looking … Read the rest

I think Mimi Rocah is right.

We have now fully entered dictatorship territory. https://t.co/Vot8e9rmLL

— Mimi Rocah (@Mimirocah1) August 15, 2018

This is dictatorship territory, and we are now in it. This is bad.

In adding John Brennan to his enemies list, Trump demonstrates again how deeply insecure and vindictive he is — two character flaws dangerous in any President.

An enemies list is ugly, undemocratic and un-American. I also believe this action to silence a critic is unlawful. https://t.co/bfOhThIWfq

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) August 15, 2018

Boy, it sure feels like the president is slowly purging the nation's security apparatus of people he considers personally disloyal https://t.co/mnDaElRaOC

— Matt Ford (@fordm) August 15, 2018

Which should not be the … Read the rest

Oh, a new one – I thought it was just a joke/analogy to talk about “identifying as” an infant but no, of course not, I should have known: it’s a Thing. It’s Adult Babies.

It starts with Neville Southall and (of course) Twitter:

Big Nev has latterly taken to tweeting about social and political issues from a left-wing / liberal perspective, building his follower list to a hefty 144,000.

As part of his aims to spread awareness about various issues, he regularly hands over control of his account to different charities – past participants have been LGBT groups, sex worker groups and a drugs helpline.

Which brings us to Wednesday, when it was announced that a a woman who

Greg Sargent at the Post notes that in primaries, Republicans who are critical of Trump lose to Republicans who passionately defend whatever he does, in particular his bragging about grabbing women by the pussy.

The big news in Tuesday night’s elections is the defeat of GOP establishment pick Tim Pawlenty in the Minnesota GOP gubernatorial primary, at the hands of a full-blown Trump loyalist. This makes a Democratic victory in the state more likely, and crucially, it probably makes it easier for Democrats to hold a couple of House seats they are defending in the state, which is key to Democrats’ hopes of taking back the lower chamber this fall.

Beyond this, Pawlenty’s loss provides a useful way to try

There was a Dyke March in Vancouver. You’ll never guess what happened. Danielle Cormier was there:

Having chosen “lesbian heroes” as our theme for this year’s March, we carried homemade signs that featured lesbians we admire — our lesbian heroes — pioneers who have made significant contributions to lesbian culture or allies in the ongoing struggle for lesbian sexual autonomy.

Many of these women are on the ever-growing list of lesbians considered enemies and “bigots” due to their views on gender, female space, or our right to gather separate from males, among peers, and to determine for ourselves who those peers are.

The roster of lesbians whose names have become taboo, forbidden, and synonymous with hatred is notable. Lesbian

Guess what: porn has a bad effect on teenage boys’ ideas about sex.

High school rapists are so influenced by pornography and so lacking in sex education, they think their victims’ tears are “part of foreplay,” says Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism campaign.

Bates shared this shocking finding at the Edinburgh Book Festival, as she warned of an epidemic of sexual assault in British schoolyards — where a rape a day occurs during term time. In the three years to 2015, 600 rapes in U.K. schools were reported to police, according to the Times of London.

Due to schools’ lack of sufficient policies for dealing with the problem, victims of assault are then being returned to classrooms

Planned Parenthood on Facebook:

It’s common to have a wide range of feelings after an abortion. Some people may feel anger, regret, guilt, or sadness, but many ultimately feel relief. And the truth is that most people who have an abortion don’t regret it.

Women. The word is women. Women have abortions. Men do not. Generic “people” do not. Women do. This refusal to say the word “women” has got to stop.

That guy to the left of the purple caption? That’s a guy. He didn’t have an abortion, so he can’t regret his abortion, because he didn’t have one. He’s not part of the class of people who can need abortions, because he’s not part of the … Read the rest

Kate Long read some T shirts.

https://twitter.com/volewriter/status/1029020130431434755

What did she find?

T shirts in the boys’ section (and those things are always labeled, so it’s not as if all kids can just grab unisex T shirts just because hey they are T SHIRTS) with

LIKE A BOSS

LEGEND

FEARLESS

BREAK THE RULES

TOTALLY AWESOME

NO RULES

EPIC SUPER

30% DUDE 20% EPIC

And in the girls’ section

DANCE DANCE DANCE

SPARKLE

sparkle always smile often dream big

SELFIES WIFI UNICORNS SPARKLE

STYLE BE WHO YOU WANT TO BE NEW YORK LONDON MILAN PARIS

MAKE TODAY BEAUTIFUL

make your dreams happen

FASHION ICON

love love love

shimmer

little LOVE

HAPPY

[a cartoon unicorn]

YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL

DREAMING OF Y♥U

Now … Read the rest

Speaking of mammoths…

The Far Corner Cafe

Mammoth undertaking.… Read the rest

Guest post by Josh Slocum.

The biggest blow patriarchy has dealt to women has been successfully convincing women that the domains of reason, logic, and analysis are oppression. That these are not faculties of women. That they are not reliable ways of navigating the world.

This is how patriarchy—as a system with women as active collaborators along with men—has stolen power from women in recent history. Removing from women the natural, objective ability to see the truth, speak it, and to be treated as one who has spoken the truth.

Many women take it and run, retreating into mysticism and renouncing the notions of logic, cause and effect, and objectivity as “male violence” imposed from the outside. Many speak … Read the rest

The Post on Trump’s NDAs.

When you make a reality TV star the president, you’re going to get a reality show White House. And when that reality TV star is Donald Trump, the reality show will have a particular character, one in which amid all the chaos and backstabbing is a cult of personality that takes precedence over any conception of public service or public good.

It’s too bad it’s that reality show, too. If it had been a cooking show we could have had Lidia Bastianich as Secretary of State.

But about this Omarosa book.

While much of the attention is focused on all the interpersonal nastiness and allegations of things such as the president being on tape using

This is nice.

… Read the rest

The Trump administration has a fabulous new plan for making the air more healthy to breathe: it’s done by redefining what is unhealthy.

A story published Monday in environmental policy outlet E&E News details the evidence. “After decades of increasingly strong assertions that there is no known safe level of fine particle exposure for the American public, [the] EPA under the Trump administration is now considering taking a new position,” reporter Niina Heikkinen wrote. “The agency is floating the idea of changing its rulemaking process and setting a threshold level of fine particles that it would consider safe.” (She’s referring to particulate matter that is 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter, small enough to penetrate deep into the circulatory

Stephen Miller has an uncle who is not proud of his nephew. Brendan Smialowski tells a story of a Jewish family that left a shtetl in Belarus to escape pogroms and conscription in the Czar’s army, and went to you guessed it the USofA in 1903. One branch settled in the Pennsylvania coal country.

The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people