Another comment on the Get the L Out post:

This is a wider issue with our police and criminal justice system. This is the Advice & Information page of the Sussex Police website. You will notice that the term sex is almost eradicated and replaced by gender. Even for crimes that largely affect women and girls (Domestic Abuse and Rape), there is not one reference to that fact. See the Hate Crime section and note that, despite sex being one of 9 protected characteristics, the abuse of a person based on their sex is not considered a criminal act. And there you have the core of the issue here….men banging on windows and obstructing women is not a criminal act. If any of those women had misgendered any of those men then she would have been guilty of a crime.
This appears to be a standard police Advice page so this is a nationwide problem. When will sex become a truly protected characteristic?

So I went to the page and found the Hate Crime section and sure enough – very first paragraph:

A hate crime is when someone commits a crime against you because of your disability, gender identity, race, sexual orientation, religion, or any other perceived difference.

So “gender identity” is the second item and “sex” is nowhere – it’s so minor it’s stowed away (aka invisible) under any other perceived difference. Trans people so vulnerable, women meh.

If that really is how they see it then what their minds were telling them about that meeting in Brighton is that the Trans Activist protesters kicking the windows were like Freedom Riders and the women at the meeting inside were like…Bull Connor and his cops.

It doesn’t always include physical violence. Someone using offensive language towards you or harassing you because of who you are, or who they think you are, is also a crime. The same goes for someone posting abusive or offensive messages about you online.

If it happens to you, you might be tempted to shrug it off. But if you tell us, we can investigate and stop it from getting worse – either for you or someone else.

They can, but they don’t – not when it’s women.

Then they spell it out again.

A hate crime is defined as ‘Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender.’

Oh. Um. So…not motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s sex, then?

Can we ask why not?

A hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.

Why not sex?

Why is sex simply left out?

It’s appalling.

Get the L Out UK:

TRA’s best friends in Brighton = MRA police! #WPUKLab19

A comment:

Never ever seen one police station flying the women’s liberation flag on IWD … yet they fly this baby pink/blue nonsense without reference to the fact it’s making political statement, which is not the police role. It discriminates against all other members of the public. Because they only fly selected flags.

Well we don’t want them flying white supremacy flags or UKIP flags, but still, yes – the zeal for “Trans Pride” from institutions that have never shown much enthusiasm for Black Pride or Female Pride is puzzling and, at this point, alarming.

Another:

This is very serious. If this is the reason why women were not protected yesterday then the police have allowed the public to be endangered on ideological grounds. They don’t get to pick and choose who to protect. We are tax payers too.

If the police have been trained to see feminist women as “TERFs” and “TERFs” as evil monsters, that’s a problem.

H/t Dave Ricks

New in Trump:

Donald Trump ordered his staff to withhold nearly $400m in aid to Ukraine days before he repeatedly pressured the country’s president to investigate a political rival, it emerged on Monday night.

The revelation has further intensified demand among Democrats for the president to be impeached.

As news of Trump’s personal intervention broke, an influential group of seven Democrats, all first-term members of Congress with military or national security backgrounds, said that “if true”, the president’s actions regarding Ukraine, Joe Biden and the former vice-president’s son Hunter would “represent an impeachable offense”.

…

The Washington Post first reported Trump’s freezing of $391m in aid to Ukraine. Trump ordered acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, it said, to suspend the almost $400m payment “at least a week” before the 25 July call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy in which he reportedly asked the Ukrainian leader to investigate the Bidens – eight times, according to the Wall Street Journal.

So that’s how the call went. “Hi Volodymyr – wondering where that $400 million payment went? Yes? Ok here’s what I need you to do if you want to see the money.”

The US began providing military aid to Ukraine shortly after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. With Ukraine’s new president still grappling with separatist rebels in the east, the aid has long been viewed as a measure of Washington’s determination to push back against Russian president Vladimir Putin.

So Trump doesn’t want to send the aid in the first place, and the kneecap-Biden motivation is just a luxurious extra.

The police just stood by at the WPUK meeting in Brighton, doing nothing while “activists” kicked the windows and shouted.

The meeting was disrupted by continual loud banging on the windows and chanting, to the point where there was a fear some windows might be broken and the excellent speech by
@rebelyarns was almost drowned out #WPUKLab19

I have never experienced such a level of threat, and I’ve been to a lot of feminist meetings. This was not a peaceful protest, it was an attempt to prevent the meeting going ahead, and it persisted throughout the equally excellent talk from @OnjaliRauf

The response from @sussex_police was inadequate to the point of negligence. Women’s right in law to congregate peacefully was not upheld by the police, who allowed a physically aggressive mob to continue their actions unopposed

It seems like the @sussex_police have been rainbow-washed to the point that the rights of women in Brighton are no longer being upheld and protected by the police. We have no law on our side in this city and we have no women-only services left either

I challenged several police officers on my way out as to why a woman’s right to hold a peaceful meeting was not being enforced by the police in attendance, and I can only report that the response was that they didn’t give a shit

I can also report that the meeting was a huge success and that the mob outside only doubled our resolve to talk and be heard. Brilliant women talked brilliantly. You can never stop us doing that.

Trump still thinks he should get a Nobel Prize…”for a lot of things.”

Julie Bindel on the WPUK meeting:

State of this outside the venue where #WPUKLab19 were meeting to talk about women’s sex-based rights, a load of trans-activist misogynists screaming, shouting and banging on the window while the police did absolutely nothing:

Ok here we go, Adam Entous did a New Yorker piece on Hunter Biden in July.

In speeches, Biden rarely talks about Hunter. But news outlets on the right and mainstream media organizations, including the Times, have homed in on him, reprising old controversies over Hunter’s work for a bank, for a lobbying firm, and for a hedge fund, and scrutinizing his business dealings in China and Ukraine.

He went to work for a lobbying firm right after he spent three years working in the Clinton administration. That’s not necessarily directly corrupt, but it is parlaying government employment into a job as a lobbyist, and not, I think it’s fair to assume, of the public interest kind. Lobbying for cleaner air is one thing and lobbying for weaker laws on clean air is another.

There is little question that Hunter’s proximity to power shaped the arc of his career, and that, as the former aide told me, “Hunter is super rich terrain.”

That’s the thing. Trump’s claims can all be bullshit, and they probably are, but this using proximity to power to get lucrative jobs pattern is its own problem. Hillary Clinton took huge fees from banks for talking to them and then ran for president, and that was not a good move.

Hunter Biden got his law degree in 1996.

Joe Biden was running for reëlection in the Senate, and he appointed Hunter as his deputy campaign manager. Hunter rented an apartment close to his father’s campaign headquarters, and also got a job as a lawyer with MBNA America, a banking holding company based in Delaware, which was one of the largest donors to his father’s campaigns. At the age of twenty-six, Hunter, who was earning more than a hundred thousand dollars and had received a signing bonus, was making nearly as much money as his father. In January, 1998, the conservative reporter and columnist Byron York wrote, in The American Spectator, “Certainly lots of children of influential parents end up in very good jobs. But the Biden case is troubling. After all, this is a senator who for years has sermonized against what he says is the corrupting influence of money in politics.”

Would a banking holding company hire a nobody right out of law school for a huge salary? (What would it be in today’s money? 200k?) I don’t think so. I think the huge salary was because he was Biden’s kid. In other words the bank was buying him to buy influence with Biden.

Then he got the job in the Clinton administration. Then…

In late 2000, near the end of President Clinton’s second term, Hunter again consulted Oldaker, who was starting a lobbying business, the National Group. Oldaker asked the co-founder of the firm, Vincent Versage, to teach Hunter the basics of earmarking—the practice of persuading lawmakers to insert language into legislation which directs taxpayer funds to projects that benefit the lobbyist’s clients.

It’s not illegal. Does that make it good?

Jumping ahead to Burisma.

Several former officials in the Obama Administration and at the State Department insisted that Hunter’s role at Burisma had no effect on his father’s policies in Ukraine, but said that, nevertheless, Hunter should not have taken the board seat. As the former senior White House aide put it, there was a perception that “Hunter was on the loose, potentially undermining his father’s message.” The same aide said that Hunter should have recognized that at least some of his foreign business partners were motivated to work with him because they wanted “to be able to say that they are affiliated with Biden.” A former business associate said, “The appearance of a conflict of interest is good enough, at this level of politics, to keep you from doing things like that.”

What I’m saying. The conflict is there even if nobody did anything shady.

Trump is going farther out on that limb.

“Joe Biden and his son are corrupt,” Trump said, referring to unfounded claims that Biden’s son was involved in a corruption scheme in Ukraine.

Trump then claimed — with no proof — that, “If a Republican ever did what Joe Biden did, if a Republican ever said what Joe Biden said, they’d be getting the electric chair right now.”

Hmmyes, as a Republican did in that…um…er…

The President also denied claims he put pressure on the Ukrainian leader by threatening to withhold US aid, saying, “I did not make a statement that ‘you have to do this or I’m not going to give you aid.’ I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that.”

He would do that. He would do that. Of course he would do that. He would do anything. He would do anything that popped into his head and gave him a thrill. It’s part of his incredible stupidity that he thinks we’ll believe him when he says things like that.

“There was no pressure put on them whatsoever. I put no pressure on them whatsoever. I could have. I think it probably, possibly would have been OK if I did,” he said.

He thinks a lot of things are ok if he does them, but he’s wrong, and he’s stupid to think he can just consult his own hunches to know whether they’re ok or not. He’s never done any homework for this job, and he has no prior experience that would be relevant, and he just carries on doing whatever he feels like anyway.

But all the same I would like to know why Hunter Biden remained on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice-president.

There’s a Woman’s Place UK meeting happening in Brighton right now. It’s being loudly and threateningly disrupted. There are police present but they’re not stopping the disruption.

WPUK:

Thank you to all the people and speakers for persevering tonight in the face of a noisy, threatening protest. The police are here but seem incapable – unwilling? – to stop protestors banging on windows. Democracy for some it seems. The law is an ass @BrightonPolice #WPUKlab19

An attendee:

Unbelievable mob outside the @Womans_Place_UK meeting in Brighton tonight, banging and pounding the windows, the din inside is deafening. Coming in we ran the gauntlet of hostile aggression, this is hate-filled public disorder and the police are not stopping it. #WPUKLab19

Another attendee:

#WPUKLAB19 ran the gauntlet of a very threatening group of people objecting to a group of women and men calling by me and others scum – for wanting safe space for women and to discuss gender and sex issues. Free speech threatened!

Another:

Attending an all women (feminist) meeting @AWomansPlaceUK and run the gauntlet of a disgusting protest outside. Can barely hear for the banging on the windows. Absolute fuckwits. So women can’t gather to discuss women and girls issues without being threatened now? #WPUKLab19

The police are doing nothing:

Women trying to attend @Womans_Place_UK meeting this evening are being met with intimidation – and @sussex_police not intervening.
Women have the right to meet without the fear of violence or intimidation. #womensrightsarehumanrights #freedomofassembly #freedomofassociation

Police reply:

We are present and ensuring that those wishing to attend are not obstructed.

WPUK:

You are not stopping the protestors intimidating our audience. You are not stopping them banging violently on the windows of the room we are in. The venue may wonder why you are allowing them to do this to their building. #WPUKLab19

New boss just like the old boss: women must not be allowed to gather or organize or speak.

When reporting goes bad:

Nancy Pelosi, who has stridently avoided calling for impeachment, wrote in a letter that continued White House obstruction over releasing the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president would trigger severe consequences.

How do you stridently avoid calling for something? How do you stridently avoid anything?

I think they meant “strenuously advised against.”

It’s live reporting, so of its nature they do it quickly and without time for proofreaders to check it…but at the same time it does kind of hint at that unconscious bias thing we all drag around with us. Whether you agree with Pelosi or not, it is after all her job to advise for and against things, and why do women get called “strident” so easily?

Anyway…meanwhile Giuliani continues to lie and bluster in the service of the worst human in the world:

Rudy Giuliani, who serves as a lawyer to Trump, was asked on Fox News about whether the president threatened to cut off aid to the Ukraine if the country did not investigate Joe Biden.

The former New York mayor initially denied the reports as a “false story.” But when pressed on whether it was “100 percent” false, Giuliani said, “I can’t tell you if it’s 100 percent.”

According to reports, Trump repeatedly pressured the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to work with Giuliani on a probe into Biden. Giuliani has previously suggested that Biden leaned on Ukraine to stomp out corruption because of an investigation into a natural gas company with connections to his son, Hunter Biden. But there is no evidence of wrongdoing on the younger Biden’s part.

That has not stopped Giuliani from cranking out baseless conspiracy theories apparently meant to try to deflect attention away from Trump.

Such as a tweet early today:

If Dem party doesn’t call for investigation of Bidens’ millions from Ukraine and billions from China, they will own it. Bidens’ made big money selling public office. How could Obama have allowed this to happen? Will Dems continue to condone and enable this kind pay-for-play?

Baseless conspiracy theories aka libel.

Trump says you have to talk about corruption.

Arriving at the UN General Assembly in New York, Trump said he was talking Democrats’ talk of impeachment “not at all seriously.”

The president also dubiously argued that his conversation with the Ukrainian leader was appropriate given the importance of discussing corruption.

“It’s very important to talk about corruption,” Trump said. “If you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt? … It’s very important that on occasion you speak to somebody about corruption.”

But it’s one thing to bring up a country’s history with corruption and quite another to suggest that the country investigate one of your political rivals.

Also, can we talk about Trump’s corruption now?

Dinesh D’Souza being…well, Dinesh D’Souza.

Children—notably Nordic white girls with braids and red cheeks—were often used in Nazi propaganda. An old Goebbels technique! Looks like today’s progressive Left is still learning its game from an earlier Left in the 1930s

Left. In the 1930s. Goebbels.

The Nazis were not “the Left.” Not then and not at any time. They killed every communist and socialist they could get their hands on. The left in the 30s was socialist or communist or somewhere between the two, and it was anti-fascist when most people were ignoring the whole subject. The Communist Party did stab all that in the back when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler and CP policy reversed itself overnight, but that doesn’t make Nazism “the Left.”

Dinesh D’Souza is a toe rag.

Hmm.

[I removed the image; see comments]

Tiffany @catgirlsister asks

WHY are cis lesbians so transphobic

and adds

pls tell me I won’t be alone forever

Maybe it’s mean to make fun of what Tiffany says…but then again women who are accused of being “transphobic” or “cis” or lesbians or all three are subject to quite a lot of meanness themselves, often set off by people like Tiffany saying things like the things Tiffany said in those tweets.

So I’ll point at what Tiffany says, and ask why Tiffany feels entitled to demand that lesbians do something to prevent him from being alone forever. Why is that lesbians’ job? Why is it lesbians’ fault that Tiffany is alone? Why isn’t Tiffany hooking up with other trans lesbians? Surely it can’t be because Tiffany is transphobic…can it?

A separate tweet:

“Tiffany” tried [to] walk into a lesbian support group but chickened out. Tiffany wants to cry. Tiffany is the real victim here, not the lesbians who just want some fucking space.

[I removed the image; see comments]

Tiffany apparently thinks lesbians ought to welcome him as a lesbian without even looking at him as he walks in the door.

Honestly I think Tiffany would feel more at home around Trumpys than around lesbians.

Typical Trumpy behavior – if there’s an island that had had a ban on motorized vehicles since 1898, why, what’s there to do but go to that island with 8 SUVs and parade around in them.

Vice President Mike Pence arrived at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in an eight-vehicle motorcade Saturday, prompting cries of “sacrilege” on social media.

Cars are generally banned on the island, and that century-old ban is integral to its charm.

When President Gerald Ford visited the island in 1975 — the only sitting president to make such a visit — he and first lady Betty Ford traveled by horse-drawn carriage.

Pence, who spoke at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, is the first sitting vice president to visit the island. He traveled to and from the airport with a cluster of monster SUVs shipped to the island Friday night.

It was the first-ever motorcade on Mackinac .

Who but a Trumpy would want such a first-ever?

Trump this morning gave an eloquent defense of his phone call with the president of Ukraine:

While Democrats stepped up calls for impeachment, President Donald Trump directly acknowledged Sunday that he spoke with the president of Ukraine about an investigation into political opponent Joe Biden, but called the talk appropriate.

Speaking with reporters en route to a trip to Texas and Ohio, Trump said: “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, with largely corruption – all of the corruption taking place – and largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”

His brain is like a broken record. The word “largely” gets into it somehow and then it gets stuck, and he can’t stop saying it. And he can’t find the word “contributing” when he wants it so he swaps in “creating.”

He described the call as “absolutely perfect.”

It’s odd the way he keeps telling us how “beautiful” his talks with heads of state are. It’s very odd, and seems like classic protesting too much. Why do people protest too much? Because they’re worried or afraid or insecure about the X they’re protesting too much about. What’s Trump insecure about? This whole business of talking to heads of state – of pretending to be a grownup and a normal functioning professional when in reality he’s a child and a bizarre incompetent amateur. He keeps bragging about the talks because he wants us to think he aced this difficult task of faking the Head of State on the Phone act. It’s no good though – we know he didn’t because we know he’s incapable of it.

The plans for Trump’s day out are almost as bizarre.

Trump spoke before a day of travel to Texas and Ohio in the company of foreign leaders.

First comes a visit to Houston for an event with India Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be held at the city’s pro football stadium. The administration is billing the Texas event – dubbed “Howdy, Modi!” – as the largest gathering ever for a foreign leader (except for the Pope).

And…why? Modi is dreadful. He’s a Hindu nationalist, which is no more benign than being a Christian nationalist or an Islamist. Theocracy is a bad thing, and Modi is a theocrat. Why is Trump giving him the Top Dog treatment? Hell if I know.