Failing state:

US President Donald Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses November’s election.

“Well, we’ll have to see what happens,” the president told a news conference at the White House. “You know that.”

No. Nobody knows that. It isn’t true.

“I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots,” Mr Trump, a Republican, said. “And the ballots are a disaster.”

When the journalist countered that “people are rioting”, Mr Trump interjected: “Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very – you’ll have a very peaceful – there won’t be a transfer, frankly, there’ll be a continuation.”

Well yes, if we get rid of the ballots, there won’t be a transfer, and that’s called a coup. A continuation minus voting is a coup.

Any pretext will do.

In an interview with France Bleu Alsace radio, Elisabeth said she was walking home when one of the three men said: “Look at that whore in a skirt.”

Two of the three men then held her while the third hit her in the face, leaving her with a black eye, she told the station. The men then fled.

They hate women, and they’re stronger than women. No deeper reason needed. She’s in a skirt! She’s in jeans! She’s a slut! She’s a bitch! There is no Acceptable State for a woman.

She said more than a dozen people witnessed the incident, but no-one intervened.

On Wednesday, junior interior minister Marlene Schiappa – who is in charge of citizenship and was previously in charge of equality issues – visited the eastern city to discuss the safety of women in public.

She told France Bleu Alsace that “the skirt is not responsible for the attack and the woman even less”.

“A woman is never hit because she wears a skirt. A woman is hit because there are people who are misogynistic, sexist, violent, and who free themselves from any law and any rule of civility by striking them.”

It’s weird, inspiring that kind of visceral hatred, yet it also becomes kind of familiar. “Oh yes, that again.”

On Thursday, France Bleu Alsace reported that two women had been attacked in another eastern city, Mulhouse, on Wednesday, after a man told one of them her skirt was “too short”.

Whores in skirts, they’re everywhere.

The UK has issued new guidance for schools on sex and relationships teaching. One passage in particular has drawn praise from people with sane views on children and “gender”:

We are aware that topics involving gender and biological sex can be complex and sensitive matters to navigate. You should not reinforce harmful stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender based on their personality and interests or the clothes they prefer to wear. Resources used in teaching about this topic must always be age-appropriate and evidence based. Materials which suggest that non-conformity to gender stereotypes should be seen as synonymous with having a different gender identity should not be used and you should not work with external agencies or organisations that produce such material. While teachers should not suggest to a child that their non-compliance with gender stereotypes means that either their personality or their body is wrong and in need of changing, teachers should always seek to treat individual students with sympathy and support.

You should work together with parents on any decisions regarding your school’s treatment of their child, in line with the school’s safeguarding policy and the statutory guidance on working together to safeguard children.

Mermaids won’t like it though.

Welcome to the theocracy of the country called The Savior, where women are harshly punished for having miscarriages and stillbirths.

A woman sentenced to 30 years in jail after a stillbirth that was judged to be her fault has been released from jail in El Salvador.

First rule of theocratic misogyny: it’s always a woman’s fault. “It” means anything and everything.

Cindy Erazo, 29, from San Salvador, was granted conditional freedom on Wednesday after six years in jail.

Morena Herrera, head of the Citizen’s Group for the Decriminalisation of Abortion, said that Erazo, who has a son aged 10, had an obstetric emergency when she was eight months pregnant. She was accused of attempting to end the pregnancy and charged with aggravated homicide. A year after her conviction, her sentenced was reduced to 10 years.

Dozens of women have been convicted for manslaughter, homicide and aggravated homicide after having miscarriages, stillbirths and other obstetric emergencies since El Salvador introduced a total ban on abortion in 1998.

On the one hand, here, please gestate this baby for us. On the other hand, your miscarriage is your fault and you get 30 years in prison for it. It’s a sweet gig, being a woman.

Paula Avila-Guillén, executive director of the Women’s Equality Center, said: “Cindy’s case casts an international spotlight on the horrific reality of El Salvador’s extreme abortion ban, and the insidious culture of persecuting innocent women that it perpetuates.

It’s as if women are balky machines as opposed to humans.

Navalny is out of the hospital.

Navalny, who has built a huge following on social media, described his condition in an Instagram post featuring a photo in which he is staring into the camera from a Berlin park bench. He wrote that sleeping is still his biggest problem and that doctors decided the best treatment is a return to “normal life.”

Navalny said he is taking walks and spending time with his family and that his plans are “simple”: daily physiotherapy sessions so he’ll be able to stand on one leg again and regain full control of his fingers. He joked that he’ll find out if he can get a prescription for the PlayStation 5.

Colleagues of Navalny say they found traces of Novichok on a water bottle in his Tomsk hotel room. The nerve agent was also used to poison Russian defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Great Britain in 2018. Russia denied any role in that attack as well.

I hope the colleagues handled that water bottle with extreme caution.

After doctors removed Navalny from his coma more than a week ago, he wrote on Instagram that he does not intend to stay in Germany. Rather, he has vowed to return to Russia to continue his work of investigating corruption among the country’s elite and pressing for democratic reform.

We have similar problems here.

This guy is fascinating. He just can’t stop telling women what to do.

It seems there was a Mumsnet thread discussing surrogacy that included harsh remarks about him, and Justine Roberts of Mumsnet took it down after he complained about it.

Well is it? Justine?! I’d like an answer please!

Who the hell does he think he is? It’s no wonder Pink News is so awful, when he’s the CEO of it.

Speaking of Trump’s refusing to accept the election result…

President Donald Trump on Wednesday would not commit to providing a peaceful transition of power after Election Day, lending further fuel to concerns he may not relinquish his office should he lose in November.

“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said when asked whether he’d commit to a peaceful transition, one of the cornerstones of American democracy.

As if “American democracy” is something to boast of at this point.

His reluctance to commit to a peaceful transition was rooted in what he said were concerns about ballots, extending his false assertion that widespread mail-in voting is rife with fraud.

“You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster,” Trump said at a press briefing at the White House, presumably referring to mail-in ballots, which he has baselessly claimed will lead to voter fraud.

Of course we know that, and we know he’s been doing it because he’s laying the groundwork for saying the election was stolen.

Trump has previously said his rival Joe Biden would only prevail in November if the election is “rigged,” and suggested earlier in the day it was likely the results of the election would be contested all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court full of friends of Trump.

So, about this election…

If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.

As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity.

And we do have a lot of very worked-up angry resentful heavily armed people, mostly on the right, especially the heavily armed ones.

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

It’s long and it’s scary.

H/t YNnB

Well you see it’s like this…

Male same-sex couples can’t reproduce. It’s that simple. They don’t need reproductive healthcare services because of the not being able to reproduce thing. Female same-sex couples can’t reproduce on their own either, but the fix for that is technologically quite simple and quick and entirely non-invasive. It’s very different from pregnancy that way. The obstacles that exist for male couples that don’t exist for straight couples are all about the presence or absence of a uterus. That’s not because of unfair laws or homophobia, it’s just how female and male bodies work.

Harrop puts it the way he does because he wants us to think that access to female reproduction is there for the asking, or taking.

He’s a medical doctor.

Newsweek reports:

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has defended 17-year-old Illinois double murder suspect Kyle Rittenhouse as a “little boy” who was merely “trying to protect his community” during the shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin last month.

Bondi appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to discuss new video footage released by Rittenhouse’s attorney which paints the suspect in a favorable light and suggests his actions were justified in the “war zone” which had broken out in Kenosha in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

“You have got a 17-year-old out there trying to protect his state,” Bondi said, despite the fact the teenager traveled from his hometown in Antioch, Illinois, to attend the protests on August 25.

Well it’s the megastate of Illiconsin, or is it Wisckinois.

Jim Wright comments:

This morning former Florida Attorney General and outspoken Republican Trump supporter Pam Bondi called Kyle Rittenhouse “a little boy out there trying to protect his community.”

So, to review:

A 17-year-old black kid walking home from the store with a bag of Skittles, who had done absolutely nothing wrong? A criminal who deserved to die.

A 17-year-old white kid who illegally crossed state lines with assault weapons and murdered two people? Little boy hero.

That’s America, right there.

That’s the Republican Party, right there.

And THAT’s the goddamn problem, right there.

And it’s taking over.

Ah you see it’s a long-term relationship, not at all a rent a woman’s uterus situation.

(First of all, the inelegance of the grammar – “us “demanding” a random woman is our surrogate” – ick. Should be “our ‘demanding'” because gerunds are nouns, but much more…demanding a woman is our surrogate? Come on. That’s what the subjunctive is for. Demanding that something is just makes no sense: who needs to demand it when it already is? If you hate the subjunctive too much to use it then make it “demanding a woman should be” but NOT “demanding a woman is.” Guy’s barely literate.)

But the substantive part is this “it’s building a long-term relationship with someone as a friend and a member of our extended family who [gestates a baby to give to us] for altruistic only reasons.”

I’m trying to picture how that’s going to work. I wonder if they’re working on such a relationship now, and if so, if the woman they’re grooming knows that’s what’s going on. I wonder – do they not already have woman friends? No, probably not, given how obviously Benjamin Cohen hates women. But so then how do they expect to be able to start now, when Benjamin C is being so frank about their plans? What kind of long-term relationship as a friend and a member of their extended family would they be able to create when their goal is not friendship and extended family but the opportunity to exploit the body of their “friend”?

In short how fucking creepy is that? What woman in her right mind would ever want anything to do with this guy?

The discussion continued.

Oh look, he said the Forbidden Words – adult female. He said it in quotation marks, but he forgot to tell us the words are forbidden, and transphobic, and terfy, and deserving of punishment.

He doesn’t think he has a right to a specific surrogate, but he does think he has a right to a surrogate in general.

Which is quite an extraordinary thing to think, and all the more so for a man who despises women so thoroughly in every other context.

Because he’s a man and she’s a woman. That’s how it works.

Oh no, a reporter asked him a question about the more than 200 thousand deaths. How dare she.

Trump is in Chynah did it mode:

Tensions between the US and China came to the fore of the annual UN General Assembly in New York, with US President Donald Trump blaming China for the spread of coronavirus.

He called for China to be held “accountable” for the pandemic.

The one he calls “the China virus.”

[A]s often is the case for speeches to the assembly, President Trump used his address to tout his achievements and tear into a rival.

It’s all he knows how to do – say how magnificent he is and pick fights with other people. He’s not a talented guy.

But Laura Trevelyan explains that it’s a campaign move.

This was a stump speech by President Trump, who faces re-election in 40 days time. He had Beijing firmly in his sights – blaming what he and his followers call the China virus for taking countless lives.

Mr Trump is trying to deflect attention from his own handling of the pandemic by heaping opprobrium on China, while emphasising US efforts to find a cure.

…For good measure, Mr Trump lumped the UN’s World Health Organization into his critique of China – saying the international body, which he’s withdrawing US funding from, is virtually controlled by China, blaming it for spreading what he called misinformation about the virus.

This was not a subtle speech. It was a clear attempt to shift blame as Americans are already voting in the presidential election.

Has Trump ever given a subtle speech?

Cory Booker is not impressed by Trump’s move to whip up his audience by saying the words “suburbia” and Cory Booker!!” together yesterday. Oooooooh Cory Booker gonna move into your suburbia and make it all SCARY and not white so be afraid be very afraid.

Trump was out flapping his lips yesterday.

Oh look at that now, it turns out women are needed for some things.

(This guy is the CEO of Pink News, scourge of ‘TERFs.”)

How casual is his “for gay male couples starting a family through surrogacy” – that is, for gay male couples renting a woman’s body to gestate a baby for them. It doesn’t sound quite so tidy and clinical and impersonal now, does it. “Through surrogacy” is such a brisk way of dismissing a woman’s nine months of increasing discomfort and fatigue ending in X hours of extreme pain.

And he says “if we were straight” but that’s not the issue. The issue is that they are both men, and two men can’t produce a baby no matter what they do. Neither can two women, but what women require from a man is a lot shall we say simpler than what men require from a woman.

It’s interesting that the CEO of Pink News carefully doesn’t utter the word “woman” in this complaint about how difficult it is for two men to make a baby.

Speaking of “a woman” with accompanying ( ) gesture to explain what a woman is, this is not the most intelligent headline I’ve ever seen.

Via Sister Outrider

This guy.

Check the gesture at 11 seconds.

(There’s also the bizarre riddle of why he says the same thing 4 times in 15 seconds, but that’s a distant second to that gesture.)

John Roberts has opposed voting rights for decades. It was a lost cause for the first 3 decades and more, but now he’s getting somewhere.

Among other things, Roberts dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), and he’s joined decisions making it much harder for voting rights plaintiffs to prove they were victims of discrimination. On the basic question of who is allowed to vote and which ballots will be counted, the most important issue in any democracy, Roberts is still the same man who tried and failed to strangle the Voting Rights Act nearly four decades earlier.

…

As originally enacted, the Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with a history of racist voting discrimination to “preclear” any new voting-related laws with the Justice Department or with federal judges in Washington, DC. But this preclearance provision was initially scheduled to expire five years after the law was signed in 1965.

That meant that in 1970, while Richard Nixon was president, Congress had to decide whether to extend the preclearance requirement or allow it to expire. And, because Congress never made the preclearance requirement permanent, Congress also chose to extend this requirement again in 1975, in 1982, and in 2006.

A Republican president every time.

As Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) told Reagan in October of 1981, conservative lawmakers feared that “anyone who seeks to change” an expansive voting rights renewal that had already passed the House “will risk being branded as racist.”

But now – it’s cool to be racist again!

As Edward Blum, a wealthy anti-civil rights activist who would go on to be the driving force behind the Supreme Court case that gutted preclearance in 2013, complained in a 2006 National Review article, “Republicans don’t want to be branded as hostile to minorities, especially just months from an election.”

But that was then! Yay! We’ve got our racist on!

It’s not hard to imagine the frustration conservative Republicans must have felt each time the act was renewed. Those Republicans elected sympathetic presidents, and they had every reason to believe that those presidents and Republican lawmakers would hear their concerns. And yet, in each case, a Republican president sided with liberals over their own conservative supporters.

Justice Antonin Scalia gave voice to this frustration during oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Roberts Court case that quashed preclearance. The Voting Rights Act, Scalia claimed, was a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” and “whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”

Only…it’s not a perpetuation of racial entitlement; it’s not an entitlement at all. It’s not a Special Favor Just For You; it’s the removal of Special Obstacles Just For You.

Roberts’s majority opinion in Shelby County posits that the United States simply isn’t racist enough to justify a fully operational Voting Rights Act.

There was a lot of heated dissent to that claim at the time and has been ever since. It’s fucking ludicrous.

Preclearance — requiring states to get federal permission before changing their own voting laws — was an “extraordinary” measure adopted to “address an extraordinary problem,” Roberts claimed. Yet, nearly a half-century after the Voting Rights Act first became law, “the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.” Black voter turnout “has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by” Section 5, Roberts claimed.

It worked, so let’s stop using it.

There are a number of fairly obvious criticisms of this argument. One of the most famous was raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissenting opinion: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Another problem is that nothing in the Constitution suggests that the Supreme Court gets to decide whether the United States is racist enough to justify extraordinary measures to halt that racism. To the contrary, the Fifteenth Amendment provides that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and it gives Congress the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

But the conservative justices ruled otherwise, so now voting rights are being mangled in the previous condition of servitude states.

So we get a flamingly racist criminal as president.