Conor Friedersdorf set off an interesting [cough] exchange of views by asking if preschool children can understand what gender-obsessed adults mean by “non-binary.”

Okay so now a question for progressives. Does this seem age-appropriate to you for a Pre-K class or do you think (as I do) that there's no way kids that age will understand what "non-binary" means? Does anyone disagree and think that's a good thing to introduce in pre-K? pic.twitter.com/48buPJOPhg

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) May 9, 2022

I don’t think young children will understand a word of that. I think complicated explanations with many moving parts and unfamiliar concepts just go over their heads. What kind of “love” are we talking about here? Do we know that … Read the rest

Pelosi wrote a letter to the Dems today:

Dear Democratic Colleague,

Last Monday, the Nation saw a draft of a Supreme Court decision that sadly would overturn Roe v. Wade, an action which is the culmination of Republicans’ decades-long crusade against women’s fundamental freedoms.

With this draft ruling striking down the nearly fifty-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade and undermining the Constitutional right to privacy, Republicans would rip away women’s right to make the most intimate and personal decisions.  If handed down, this decision by GOP-appointed Justices would mean that, for the first time in our history, America’s daughters will have less freedom than their mothers.

Republicans have made clear that their goal will be to seek to

Aaron Rupar watched the governors gloat so that we don’t have to.

If the Supreme Court follows through on a leaked draft decision that would end the federal right to an abortion, abortion procedures would immediately become illegal in the 22 red or purple states that already have bans on the books. Comments from Republican governors on the most recent round of Sunday news shows served as grim reminders of what that would mean for women — and hinted at rights Republicans will come for next.

Spoiler: they’re not stopping with abortion.

Hutchinson [Arkansas] and Reeves [Mississippi] know they’re essentially making women second-class citizens. During their Sunday interviews, both governors tried to soften the blow by vowing to provide more

We haven’t finished yet, they gloat. There’s more, they smirk. Your life belongs to us, they sneer.

The Republican governor of Mississippi has refused to rule out attempting to ban some forms of contraception if the supreme court ruling that guarantees the right to abortion should fall.

…

Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Reeves confirmed that his state’s trigger law would go into effect if Roe is overturned.

Reeves’ host on CNN, Jake Tapper, then referred to neighbouring Louisiana, where Republicans have advanced a bill to make abortion a crime of murder.

Tapper said: “They’re talking about not only criminally charging girls and women who get abortions as committing homicide, but they’re also talking about defining the moment of

How dare women talk about women things.

Another walkout:

A body representing football writers in Scotland has apologised after a speaker’s sexist and misogynistic jokes prompted attendees to walk out of its annual awards dinner.

…

Gabriella Bennett, the co-chair of Women In Journalism Scotland, told BBC Radio Scotland: “I really enjoy it as an event, but there are always off-colour jokes made by the speakers … sexist or misogynistic. But last night’s speech was really next-level. I walked out after about five minutes of maybe a 20-minute speech.

“My table stood up to leave, and I saw Eilidh Barbour and people on her table start to leave. But there were loads of people laughing at these jokes. We were two tables in an enormous room

Trump again artlessly tells the world what an incompetent fool he is by talking trash about people he himself gave the jobs he says they did so badly.

Trump, in a written statement to CBS’s 60 Minutes, said he had “no comment” when asked whether he ever asked ex-defense secretary Mark Esper about sending “missiles into Mexico” to destroy drug cartel labs in the country, which Esper claimed in a memoir published this week.

So that’s a yes.

“Mark Esper was weak and totally ineffective, and because of it, I had to run the military,” Trump’s statement to 60 Minutes boasted. “He was a lightweight and figurehead, and I realized it very early on.”

Well not “early on” enough, clearly, … Read the rest

Australia’s Labor Party is disappearing women from its policies.

Labor has “betrayed” women by axing the words “mother”, “breastfeeding” and “pregnant women” from its official policy platform, say women’s rights advocates.

The official ALP National Platform, a blueprint for its direction in government, has even got rid of an entire section devoted to “maternal and child health”.

Because…what? None of that is needed any more?

The current 2021 policy document which “sets out the contemporary policy agenda that an Albanese Labor Government will implement” does not mention the word mother once.

In the older 2018 version it spoke about mothers four times, and also had references to pregnant mothers and breastfeeding.

Now the new policy references “people” and “individuals”

Ok so I am reading Sullivan’s revolting piece, because I’m masochistic that way. 14 words in I’m already pissed off.

To say that a leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling prompted an elite meltdown would be a gross understatement.

“Elite.” What an asshole. Does he think non-elite women want to be forced to bear children they don’t want? You can’t even phrase it so that it makes sense – women who don’t want a pregnancy don’t want the pregnancy, so of course no women want to be forced to do what they don’t want to do. It’s a contradiction in terms. But here’s smug Sullivan calling us “elite” for saying so. Easy for him.

The seriously … Read the rest

Remember how we were told the FBI was investigating Kavanaugh? When it wasn’t? Remember how Kavanaugh lied under oath in his hearing? Remember his fake tantrum? Remember who and what he is?

You need a damn good reason to justify protesting outside someone’s house. Brett Kavanaugh being a serial sexual assaulter who lied under oath while being illegitimately appointed, and is now trying to take away women’s most fundamental rights, sounds like a damn good reason.

— Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) May 8, 2022

People are like "What about Kanavaugh's poor neighbours? Why should THEY be subjected to this?" And then I found out the protest was organized -by- one of Kavanaugh's neighbours, damn this rocks https://t.co/0L9ySeFvYo

— Jesse Hawken (@jessehawken)

Oh yay, we can all live together at last.

What Roe did was kickstart the extreme cultural polarization that has log defined and blighted American politics. Maybe the end of Roe can mark the beginning of a return to living together, and negotiating a way to make that bearable.https://t.co/o4b6TYBKT0

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 6, 2022

Absolutely. Half of us told we have no rights over our own bodies will do wonders for living together.… Read the rest

The war between peasants and pheasants continues.

Some people from Totnes, in Devon, went out for a picnic in the woods.

[T]he Duke of Somerset owns much of the area’s woodlands, and they remain largely off-limits to the public because they are used for a large pheasant shoot.

The Duke owns 2,800 acres of land in some of the most beautiful areas of Devon, but the vast majority of it is inaccessible to the public. This is despite the fact he has received funds for the woodland the protesters picnicked in under the English Woodland Grant Scheme, which comes from taxpayer money.

Yes but owning huge tracts of land is what being a duke is all about. Nobody … Read the rest

Ursula K. LeGuin on abortion rights:

My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke….

What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could

Amy Davidson Sorkin on how it’s going to be if Alito’s poison pen ruling stands:

The most immediate effect of Dobbs, if the draft opinion holds, will be that tens of millions of women will abruptly lose access to abortion. The ruling itself would not institute a ban, but it would give states almost boundless power to do so. More than twenty states already have measures in place that would severely curtail access: “trigger laws,” designed to go into effect once Roe is overturned; restrictions in state constitutions; or laws that predate Roe but were left on the books. After the draft was leaked, Louisiana legislators moved forward with a bill that would not only ban almost all abortions but

New Mexico:

“Historic” and “extreme” weather conditions could fan a wildfire in New Mexico which is already the second biggest ever seen in the US state.

The so-called Hermits Peak Fire has been burning for more than a month and has torn through an area larger than the city of Chicago.

Many families have been left homeless and thousands have been evacuated.

Winds, near-record high temperatures and dry conditions are now expected to stoke the blaze further.

This is the new reality. In some places it’s rising sea levels, flooding, land disappearing the way it is in the bayous south of New Orleans, in other places it’s crops failing because of heat and lack of water or torrential rain, … Read the rest

Make sure to nail all the windows closed before releasing the cyanide.

As the Supreme Court considers potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, abortion rights activists are heralding abortion pills as a potential option in places where clinics may have to close — but several red states are already cracking down on the pills.

They’ll be mandating bags over the head next.

The governor of Tennessee signed a law in May making it a felony to mail abortion pills, punishable by 20-year imprisonment and a $50,000 fine. The law also adds further restrictions to medication abortion.

There is no crime worse than aiding The Enemy Woman to be free.… Read the rest

Unbelievable.

"A child who is, in fact, living out part of his or her early life as an ectopic pregnancy is still a unique human being with its own DNA. I don't understand why we allow those children to be murdered."—Okla Sen. Warren Hamilton

Ectopic pregnancies KILL women & are NEVER viable. https://t.co/wvEQqYgnk6 pic.twitter.com/jFIJOBLyuL

— Kendall Brown (@kendallybrown) April 29, 2022

… Read the rest

Clair Wills suggests we think about Ireland’s experience with the unwanted pregnancy problem:

In a couple of weeks’ time, on May 25, Ireland will mark the fourth anniversary of the abortion referendum, when, with broad cross-party support, 66.4 percent of the population voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. 

Adopted following a deeply divisive referendum in 1983, “the Eighth” asserted the right to life of the unborn, “with due regard to the equal rights of the mother.” Abortion had been illegal in Ireland since the passage of the British Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which was kept on the statute books after independence. But for religious conservatives it was not illegal enough.

In the early

Garrett Epps on Alito’s arrogance:

…one paragraph in Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization stands out for its thoroughgoing mix of hypocrisy and dishonesty. Advocates of legalized abortion, Alito writes, argue that “without the availability of abortion … people will be inhibited from exercising their freedom to choose the types of relationships they desire, and women will be unable to compete with men in the workplace and in other endeavors.”

Do they? I don’t know. I just argue that women should be able to stop being pregnant if they don’t want to be pregnant.

But, Alito explains, the foes of abortion have the answer to this lament:

They explain that attitudes about the

Clarence Thomas tells us he will not be bullied.

Following protests sparked by the leak of a draft U.S. Supreme Court decision indicating the justices are poised to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas said on Friday that the court cannot be “bullied.”

We know. That’s the nature of the Court: once they’re there, we’re stuck with them (barring impeachment, which is vanishingly rare).

Thomas, one of the most conservative justices on the nine-member court, made only a few passing references to the protests over the leaked draft opinion as he spoke at a judicial conference in Atlanta.

As a society, “we are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t