A piece of a Fresh Air interview yesterday that struck me as odd. The interview is with David Kirkpatrick,  the New York Times Cairo bureau chief from 2011 to 2015.

GROSS: So you’re living in London now, still working for The New York Times. And I’m wondering, like, if you think the lens through which you’re seeing London has been affected from your years in Cairo.

KIRKPATRICK: My time in Cairo and covering the Arab Spring has made me much more sensitive than I was previously to what I guess I should just call anti-Muslim bigotry. I find that when I move in sophisticated liberal circles in the U.S. or the U.K., the only group that you can make sort

Oh good, more women getoutery.

His appointment is the first of its kind in British history. No other mayor has hired an LGBT adviser to help tackle problems facing the community — despite the Labour party itself having an LGBT advisory panel. But yesterday, it was announced that Carl Austin-Behan would serve as the first LGBT adviser to Andy Burnham, the directly elected Labour mayor of Greater Manchester.

Hmmmm. Wait. He’s a guy. How can he tackle (all) the problems facing Ls? Which “community” is “the community” here? Gay men remain men, and lesbians remain women, and having men speak for women isn’t always an ideal arrangement.

Just hours before Burnham unveiled this new role, which comes with its

Trump-supporting Congress dude busted for insider trading.

Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y. was arrested Wednesday morning on federal insider trading charges, law enforcement officials said.

An indictment obtained from a federal grand jury alleges relates to Australian biotech company Innate Immunotherapeutics, on which Collins served as a board member.

The indictment alleges Collins scrambled to call his son from the White House lawn and tell him non-public information about a failed drug trial in which they both owned shares.

Nice touch that he did it from the White House lawn. I wonder if he passed Melania in her $1400 plaid shirt and pristine jeans pretending to “garden.”

Collins was Trump’s first supporter in Congress, and was reportedly a member

Glasgow Rapecrisis on Facebook:

Really sad to report today that we have had to close down the #GlasgowClydeRapeCrisis waiting list for all new survivors coming to the project. We can still offer telephone helpline support on 08088 00 00 14 every day of the week from 11.00 am until 2.00 pm and Monday to Thursday from 5.30 pm until 7.30 pm and we can offer drop-in services to survivors on Wednesdays from 10.30 am until 3.00 pm and Wednesday evenings from 5.30 pm until 7.30 pm. Please check our website for more info about support. We are so sorry for having to make this decision but recent loss of funding for our work with young women and girls has

Yes, the Saudis are in a snit all right.

Now deleted, here a screenshot of the threatening Saudi "infographic" featuring an airliner headed for the Toronto skyline. pic.twitter.com/LrkCLxxjFk

— Tobias Schneider (@tobiaschneider) August 6, 2018

More:

Amid a diplomatic spat between Saudi Arabia and Canada, a pro-Saudi Government Twitter account shared – and then deleted – a digitally altered image that appeared to show a plane flying towards the skyline of Toronto, Canada’s largest city.

The image, shared by the account @infographic_ksa, was accompanied by a message in English that contained the saying, “He who interferes with what doesn’t concern him finds what doesn’t please him.” The text “sticking one’s nose where it doesn’t belong!” was also superimposed over

Bookmarks Bookshop on Facebook:

Socialist bookshop calls for solidarity following Nazi attack

Bookmarks bookshop in Bloomsbury, central London, has called on supporters to attend a solidarity event following an attack by far right thugs.
Twelve men invaded the shop last Saturday, destroying displays, wrecking books and chanting Alt-right slogans. One was wearing a Donald Trump mask.
Since the attack Bookmarks the socialist bookshop has received messages of support from leading figures in the trade union and labour movements and thousands of activists from around the world.
Those tweeting their support include singer and activist Billy Bragg, Rupa Huq MP, historian Louise Raw and Guardian columnist Owen Jones.
David Lammy MP tweeted: “The normalisation of far right politics is already

Ah, so that’s how it’s done.

A Japanese medical school deliberately cut women’s entrance test scores for at least a decade, an investigation panel said on Tuesday, calling it a “very serious” instance of discrimination, but school officials denied having known of the manipulations.

…

The alterations were uncovered in an internal investigation of a graft accusation this spring regarding the entrance exam for Tokyo Medical University, sparking protests and anger.

Lawyers investigating bribery accusations in the admission of the son of a senior education ministry official said they concluded that his score, and those of several other men, were boosted “unfairly” – by as much as 49 points, in one case.

When it becomes unfashionable to tell women … Read the rest

The Times takes a farewell look at Paul Ryan:

As has been strenuously noted, Trump and Ryan are stylistic and philosophical opposites: Trump the blunt-force agitator vs. Ryan the think-tank conservative. Trump lashes out while Ryan treads carefully. Ryan still fashions himself a “policy guy” and a man of ideas: In high school, he read the conservative philosopher Ayn Rand and was captivated by her signature work, “Atlas Shrugged.”

Stop right there. One, reading Atlas Shrugged does not make anyone a person of ideas. Two, Ayn Rand was not a philosopher. She was a screenwriter and a novelist.

The speaker says he tries to encourage good behavior in the president. “He put out a tweet last night that

Pete Vernon at Columbia Journalism Review on Trump’s attacks on the press:

As Trump has ratcheted up his media criticism, his supporters have been given the opportunity to show they’re getting the message. A trio of rallies provided scenes of hostility toward journalists doing their jobs, leading to frightening—and increasingly dire—predictions. The New York Times’s Bret Stephens wrote Friday about a threatening voicemail he received, in which the caller said, “I don’t carry an AR but once we start shooting you f—ers you aren’t going to pop off like you do now. You’re worthless, the press is the enemy of the United States people.” Arguing that it’s only a matter of time until one of Trump’s devotees takes

Greg Sargent says it’s not just that Trump admitted collusion in That Tweet, and not just that in the process he also admitted the statement he composed about That Meeting was a lie – it’s also that he revealed why.

But what’s also notable is why Trump tweeted this. He was responding to a report in The Post that said this:

Trump has confided to friends and advisers that he is worried the Mueller probe could destroy the lives of what he calls “innocent and decent people” — namely Trump Jr. … As one adviser described the president’s thinking, he does not believe his son purposefully broke the law, but is fearful nonetheless that Trump Jr. inadvertently may have

The state of this.

Tom Watson has vowed to face down an online campaign to oust him as Labour’s deputy leader after he criticised the party leadership’s handling of the antisemitism row.

Critics of Watson caused the hashtag #ResignWatson to trend on Twitter, after an Observer interview in which he said Labour faced a “vortex of eternal shame” unless it tackled the issue head-on.

The deputy leader called for the party to end disciplinary action against the MPs Ian Austin and Margaret Hodge, who criticised Jeremy Corbyn’s response to the row, and also said Labour should fully adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and all its examples.

On Monday, the party suspended George McManus,

Adam Davidson at the New Yorker notes that 44 years ago today Nixon released the “smoking gun tape” after the Supreme Court ruled that he had to; three days later he resigned.

On August 5, 2018, precisely forty-four years after the collapse of the Nixon Presidency, another President, Donald Trump, made his own public admission. In one of a series of early-morning tweets, Trump addressed a meeting that his son Donald, Jr., held with a Russian lawyer affiliated with the Russian government. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere,” he wrote. “I did not know about it!”

The tweet contains several crucial pieces

My goodness, woke activism gets more surprising every day. Here’s @transphilosophr, who describes herself thus:

Writer. Ex-academic philosopher. @RebelMouse | Forthcoming book “Transgressive: A Trans Woman on Gender, Feminism and Politics” with @JKPBooks #WomenInTech

And here’s how she talks about “TERFs” – i.e. women she doesn’t like.

I've figured it out! TERFs smell so bad because they live on a steady diet of red herring. Red herrings for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Red herring body wash. Red herring shampoo. Red herring supplements. If it smells like rotten fish, TERFs probably love it.

— @rachelwilliams@hachyderm.io (@rach_a_williams) August 4, 2018

Women smell like fish, haw haw haw.

That’s a misogynist “joke” that goes back as far as jokes, but she’s insisting that … Read the rest

Bad:

It just will not end. We may be witnessing the complete collapse of the ecosystem. Much of [southwest Florida] now enveloped in the smell of death.

This is just one canal. People are reporting the smell up to 15 miles inland.

Sad times. Still no Mainstream Media Coverage. Please share.

From the Times on July 30:

Florida has an algae problem, and it’s big. This year, an overgrowth in the waters off the state’s southwestern coast is killing wildlife and making some beaches noxious.

The toxic algal bloom, known as a red tide, is not unusual. Red tides appear off the state’s coast almost every year. But this one, still going strong after roughly nine months, is

Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018

It was totally legal, it’s done all the time – plus, also, he knew nothing about it! Just in case it turns out it wasn’t totally legal, or in fact legal at all, even slightly. Belt and braces, people, belt and braces.

I’m old enough to remember when this meeting was about adoptions. https://t.co/SZ2FDwsNzO

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) August 5, 2018

Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström points out that “it’s our/their culture” is not a blank check to violate women’s rights.

I want to reflect on the word “culture”, and the way that it is used to justify the oppression of women. I believe firmly that culture should never be accepted as an excuse for the oppression of women.

“Culture” is typically defined by sociologists as a set of values, norms and beliefs among a group.  It may refer to the traditional culture in Afghanistan, of football fans in Argentina, or of university students in Sweden. Let me clarify what I mean by the “oppression” of women. I use the term to mean all instances when a woman is restricted

The Post has another long story on how much more wack Trump is this week than he was last week. I just want to point to the final item in the story.

Trump made a surprise call into Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show Wednesday to congratulate the conservative icon on his 30th anniversary on the air. Trump mused aloud with Limbaugh about whether it would be more politically advantageous for him to shut down the government over border wall funding before or after the November elections.

“I’ve heard a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, don’t do it before the election. We’ll upset the applecart,’ ” Trump said. But, he added, “I actually think it’s a great campaign issue. I think