Ari Berman (author of the voting rights classic Give Us the Ballot) on the horrific ruling:

Breaking: Supreme Court upholds GOP voting restrictions in Arizona, further weakening Voting Rights Act & giving green-light to GOP voter suppression laws. 6-3 opinion by Alito. Kagan dissents https://t.co/YTt9hzew3n

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) July 1, 2021

5 of 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by GOP presidents who initially lost popular vote & confirmed by senators representing minority of Americans

American democracy completely broken

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) July 1, 2021

In 2013 SCOTUS gutted Voting Rights Act. Since then 26 states have enacted new voter suppression laws

Now conservative majority shredding what remains of VRA, giving green-light to greatest rollback of

Nina Totenberg says the Voting Rights Act is basically dead.

The U.S. Supreme Court for all practical purposes rendered the landmark Voting Rights Act a dead letter on Thursday.

The 6-to-3 vote was along ideological lines, with Justice Samuel Alito writing the decision for the conservative court majority, and the liberals in angry dissent.

At issue in the case were two Arizona laws. One banned the collection of absentee ballots by anyone other than a relative or caregiver, and the other threw out any ballots cast in the wrong precinct. A federal appeals court struck down both provisions, ruling that they had an unequal impact on minority voters, and that there was no evidence of fraud that would have

The right-wing Supreme Court approves voting restrictions.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday made it easier for states to enact voting restrictions, endorsing Republican-backed measures in Arizona that a lower court had decided disproportionately burdened Black, Latino and Native American voters and handing a defeat to Democrats who had challenged the policies.

So, that’s it, that’s the ballgame. We’re fucked. Republicans can now pass all kinds of laws that make it harder for poor people, working people, immigrant people, brown people to vote, thus expanding and consolidating their power from this moment on. We are fucked.

The Arizona ruling clarified the limits of the Voting Rights Act and how courts may analyze claims of voting discrimination.

The “mere fact

Hello hello yes please do walk all over me, it’s what I’m here for, can I do anything else for you?

A retiree in Suffolk has made history as the first transgender woman to star on the front cover of the Women’s Institute magazine.

A man has “made history” as the first man to star on the front cover of the Women’s Institute magazine. It’s extremely history-making for men to appear on the front covers of magazines.

WI member Petra Wenham, 74, has spoken to WI Life – the publication for the group’s members – after she was asked to discuss her work as as a speaker and activist for a Suffolk chapter of the branch, Cake and Revolution.

Another victory in the war on Karens:

Bill Cosby is being released from prison after the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania vacated his 2018 conviction on sexual assault charges and judgment of sentence. Victoria Valentino, one of Cosby’s accusers, told CNN she was “stunned” by the court’s decision.

Valentino said she had recently received a letter stating that Cosby’s parole was preemptively denied due to a lack of remorse and a refusal to participate in programs for abusers.

She said that when she first heard about Cosby’s release she was “shocked.” Valentino said her phone was bombarded with messages from media, loved ones and survivors.

“For this to come out of left field is — it’s a gut punch,” Valentino

Laurie Penny tries to rehabilitate herself.

THREAD:
The question of how to balance different peoples’ needs in public spaces is important. It’s being had in bad faith right now, by people who want to make the case for excluding minority groups- but it speaks to something important that lots of communities are considering.

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) June 30, 2021

That’s good, isn’t it? She accuses us of bad faith while in the same breath claiming we want to “make the case for excluding minority groups.” Way to have the discussion in good faith. No, Comrade, we don’t want to make the case for excluding minority groups. That’s not accurate or fair.

And often- too often- a request that a

If it doesn’t convince anyone the first 500 times, try again.

I see a lot of ‘gender critical’ people frantically rules-lawyering here- all sorts of specious explanations as to why their ‘treat all trans women as potential sex criminals’ is different from homophobes’ ‘treat all gay people as potential sex criminals’. Seems I struck a nerve.

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) June 30, 2021

The dishonesty battles with the stupidity for first prize.

As always, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s anxious adherence to the rules or genuine delusional belief – in fact it’s impossible to tell just as it’s impossible to tell if any given naked man in a women’s changing room genuinely believes he’s a woman or is just … Read the rest

Matt Taiibi has a hilarious piece on a new book by Robin DiAngelo.

Nice Racism, the booklike product released this week by the “Vanilla Ice of Antiracism,” Robin DiAngelo, begins with an anecdote from the author’s past.

I just have to interrupt to say how much I love “booklike product.”

She’s in college, gone out to a dinner party with her partner, where she discovers the other couple is, gasp, black. “I was excited and felt an immediate need to let them know I was not racist,” she explains, adding: “I proceeded to spend the evening telling them how racist my family was. I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family

You’ve probably seen the Wi Spa video.

LA Magazine does not approve of the woman who doesn’t want a naked man in the women’s section with her.

Mineral salt massages and hydro-dermabrasion facials weren’t enough to calm the nerves of some patrons at Wi Spa over the weekend. The tony Koreatown health club became the scene of a showdown over nudity in gendered spaces after a customer confronted spa staff about a trans woman with male genitals being allowed to disrobe in the spa’s female section. The ruckus was caught on camera and quickly went viral on Twitter on Sunday, fueling a furious online debate—with threats of a boycott against the spa—about the rights of trans people to use

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is expected to charge the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer with tax-related crimes on Thursday, people familiar with the matter said, which would mark the first criminal charges against the former president’s company since prosecutors began investigating it three years ago.

Another twig added to the haystack of sleaze that is Trumpworld.

How disgusting it is that this filthy man spent four years telling us what to do.

Word is Trump won’t be charged; Weisselberg has refused to be turned.

This one is about not paying taxes on fringe benefits, which sounds laughably trivial given what we know about Trump, but little acorns, you know.

The tax-related

How do they know he identifies as a man?

A group of customers at a cafe in the Aegean district of Soma rescued a woman from a male attacker identified only as T.Ç. who broke a glass on her head and battered her, local agencies reported on June 29.

Video footage showed T.Ç. sitting across from his wife at a cafe before getting up, walking over to her side of the table with a glass and breaking it on her head, and attacking her with a knife he picked up off the table. 

The security footage shows customers run to the woman’s rescue and batter the man in an attempt to fend him off of the woman.

It shows a … Read the rest

I read Glosswitch’s take on Laurie Penny’s fatuous claims this morning (this morning my time, Hellfire West Coast time) but got too entangled with LP’s nonsense to point it out here. Let this be a lesson to you: if you can read either Laurie Penny or Glosswitch, don’t choose Laurie Penny.

Glosswitch starts with the “I’d advise her not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude” tweet. The issue is not penises, she assures us.

The issue – highlighted in another of [the] well-known feminist’s tweets today, in which she told feminists who think biological sex is politically salient “your feminism is bad and you should feel bad” – is making other women feel ashamed

The same failure throughout.

It's utterly disingenuous to equate people *getting changed in changing rooms* with flashers. One is a sex crime. The other is using a facility the way it was intended.

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) June 29, 2021

No, what’s utterly disingenuous is to ignore the (surely blindingly obvious) fact that no one knows who is a guy who identifies as a woman getting changed in a changing room and who is a flasher. No one knows who is which and no one knows how to find out. If you were a flasher wouldn’t you be in those changing rooms like a shot, unable to believe your luck?

Because a person changing their clothes in a changing room

But, no, we really don’t know that. How could we?

I’m not ‘defending males exposing themselves to children’, though, and you know that. I’m making the point that a trans person using a changing room is categorically not the same as a person deliberately and obscenely flashing a child.

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) June 29, 2021

But even if we assume that’s true (and crystal clear, and easy to understand, and universally acknowledged), how does anyone know who is which?

This is surely a very basic question, and it seems to be one that no trans “ally” will answer. It sure as hell seems that Laurie Penny will never answer it.

So you think that any trans woman using a

Putative feminist puts her putative feminism to work standing up for men again.

Feminism isn’t just about what you believe. It’s also about how you behave. If your claim to feminism boils down to spending 90% of your free time harassing trans women and their allies on Twitter dot com, your feminism is bad and you should feel bad.

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) June 29, 2021

If your claim to feminism includes telling feminist women not to focus on women but instead to focus on men who claim to be women, your feminism is moronic and you should feel like a damn fool.

But instead, putative feminist feels confident and clever enough to keep right on telling feminist women to … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on 408 times on Fox News.

I confess to finding, Nullius, little to grow exercised about in the link you provide to ‘Critical Theory’. It speaks of The Frankfurt School, Kant, and of a liberal thinker like Habermas. It also refers to Karl Marx’s polemical assertion in ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ that ‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ I would say two things: first, thought about political and social structures has, pace Marx, never been a view taken studiously from the outside, as though thinkers about these matters were dispassionately studying, say, an ant colony. Read Plato, read Aristotle, Confucius, Lao-tse, Kautilya, Sir … Read the rest

Yes, Virginia, this could be the new normal, and yes it is scary.

The dangerous heat wave enveloping the Pacific Northwest is shattering weather records by such large margins that it is making even climate scientists uneasy.

You mean especially. Not even, but especially.

Infrastructure, including heating and cooling, is built according to expectations of a “normal” climate. Human-caused climate change is quickly redefining that normal, while dramatically raising the likelihood of events that simply have no precedent.

All the air conditioners are running practically nonstop. Does that put a strain on the electricity grid? Gee, I wonder.

“Because of the fact that climate change has made heatwaves like this much more likely and intense, we might very well

Judd Legum on that critical theory that everyone’s talking about.

Between now and November 2022, you will be hearing a lot about Critical Race Theory (CRT). On Saturday night, former President Trump bashed CRT during his first rally since leaving the White House. Last week, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the “END CRT Act.” In the first two weeks of June, CRT was mentioned 408 times on Fox News. 

Andrew Sullivan is obsessed with it.

It’s all because Republicans see it (see their distortions of it) as election magic.

Trump, Cruz, Bannon, and many other Republicans say that CRT is an insidious force that is being imposed in schools, corporations, and the government. This is how Cruz 

God the confident Do What I Say of them!

Hi Lizzie, it is really disappointing and quite shocking to see you re-tweeting Maya Forstater, who has expressed transphobic views and is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

— Laura Hughes-Onslow (née Solomons) (@LauraMS70) February 25, 2021

And it’s Laura’s business what Lizzie retweets why? I don’t care if they’re sisters, I don’t care if they’re married, I don’t care if they’ve been best friends since infancy – nobody gets to micromanage what other people say in public that way.

Ok there are some exceptions, employers can if it’s work-related, I think, and similar items, but just “You may not do that because I disapprove,” no. No and fuck off, no in thunder.… Read the rest

So it looks as if Princess Ivanka may have perjured herself.

The Trump family has trouble with depositions. In 2007 testimony, Donald Trump was repeatedly shown to be a liar. In February, Donald Trump Jr. was deposed in the Trump inauguration scandal lawsuit, and on several key points, under oath, he provided false testimony. A review of documents filed in that case and other material obtained by Mother Jones shows that Ivanka Trump also testified inaccurately during her deposition in this lawsuit. 

“Testified inaccurately” meaning “perjured herself.”

The inauguration probe was launched last year by Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, DC. He has alleged that Trump’s inauguration committee misused charitable funds to enrich the Trump family.