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

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

These people genuinely seem to believe that Surrogacy in the UK is us “demanding” a random woman is our surrogate. Instead it’s building a long-term relationship with someone as a friend and a member of our extended family who does so for altruistic only reasons pic.twitter.com/1bRYDV6qr8

— Benjamin Cohen (@benjamincohen) September 23, 2020

(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 … Read the rest

The discussion continued.

They are also claiming that I don’t want to pay “an adult female to rent a uterus”. Doing what they are asking for, would be illegal as commercial surrogacy is not allowed in the UK (2/3)

— Benjamin Cohen (@benjamincohen) September 22, 2020

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.

And I’d add because the transphobes are deliberately spinning things. I don’t think that I have a right to a specific surrogate. I do think that I should have the right to things like a F**king BLOOD TEST on the

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

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.

Sen. Booker responds to Pres. Trump's comments about him: "I'm tired, I really am exhausted, at the end of this man's time as president, he has pushed every racially divisive nerve possible in this country." pic.twitter.com/Cap4CINquP

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 22, 2020

… Read the rest

Trump was out flapping his lips yesterday.

"I turn on NBC w/Lester Holt, another beauty, & they start w/a hurricane, & then they went to something…I'm saying, 'First Lady, this is getting a little embarrassing…they haven't mentioned the Nobel'"- Trump whines that NBC covered a hurricane instead of his Nobel nomination pic.twitter.com/C3jRDy5NH1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 22, 2020

https://twitter.com/ava/status/1308430557550837760 … Read the rest

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 … Read the rest

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… Read the rest

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.)… Read the rest

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

The Post on TrumpBarr’s provocation:

Following a memorandum that President Trump issued earlier this month, the Justice Department published a list of cities that the White House wants to get more aggressive on civil unrest in the wake of police shootings and killings.

“We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted,” Attorney General William P. Barr said in a statement. “It is my hope that the cities identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens.”

He’s an enforcer for the guy who has failed to protect us by failing to deal with the pandemic responsibly, to the tune of many … Read the rest

Wait a minute though.

If your criticism about a potential Supreme Court nominee is her religion, can I kindly suggest that you look in the mirror and think about when you decided that religious discrimination is okay.

— Carissa Byrne Hessick (@CBHessick) September 21, 2020

Wait.

Religion is about beliefs. It’s also about practices, rituals and so on, but beliefs are important. Beliefs influence how people think, and what people think – high court justices included.

How can we evaluate Supreme Court nominees if we’re not allowed to evaluate their beliefs?

It’s a nice little racket the religions have worked out for themselves in the US: their freedom (of religion) is inscribed in the Bill of Rights, so Catholic bishops … Read the rest

Jo Bartosch explains those arrests in Leeds yesterday:

Yesterday, when the group Standing for Women tried to assemble at Victoria Square in Leeds to discuss the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act (2004) (GRA) their meeting was broken-up by the police. Three of the sixteen women were arrested, including the event organiser Kellie-Jay Keen. A lengthy risk assessment had been completed and submitted ahead of the event to ensure the group were Covid-19 compliant, and the police were kept fully appraised of the group’s plans. After the event Kelly-Jay Keen explained that she knew [she] was likely to be arrested, part of the reason she refused to give her details to the police was in order to have

Huh. Suddenly I live in an outlaw city, banished by the Feds into outer darkness.

Statement from the Department of Justice:

Department Of Justice Identifies New York City, Portland And Seattle As Jurisdictions Permitting Violence And Destruction Of Property

Identification is Response to Presidential Memorandum Reviewing Federal Funding to State and Local Governments that are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities

I guess they mean this presidential memorandum:

President Trump on Wray: "Antifa's a bad group, and they're criminals, and they're anarchists, and they're agitators, and they're looters, and rioters, and everything else. They're bad — and when a man doesn't say that, that bothers me." pic.twitter.com/qk97F8AY9K

— The Hill (@thehill) September 18, 2020

The DoJ continues:… Read the rest

Despicable.

At a rally in Minnesota, President Trump described an MSNBC anchor hit by a rubber bullet while covering protests after the death of George Floyd in May as “a beautiful sight,” comments quickly condemned by journalists including CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Absolutely heinous. @AliVelshi didn’t deserve to be shot by a rubber bullet, anyone celebrating that violence has something wrong with them, and it’s twisted for anyone least of all a president to call it “law and order.” No journalist should find this acceptable. https://t.co/1VDhdfoL1H

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 19, 2020

In a statement, an MSNBC spokesperson said “freedom of the press is a pillar of our democracy. When the president mocks a journalist for the injury he

Another landmark ruling:

A U.K. employment tribunal has ruled that non-binary and gender fluid people are protected under the Equality Act.

Protected from what?

The Equality Act protects people from discrimination on the basis of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. But a landmark ruling today now confirms that protection to non-binary and gender fluid people does fall under the gender reassignment category, after years of ambiguity.

Protection from what though? Discrimination, it says, but what would discrimination against non-binary people look like? What exactly are we talking about?

The case was brought by a non-binary engineer working in Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) plant. Ms Taylor

Been wondering why Trump talked to Woodward at all? I sort of wondered, before other things replaced it.

Trump was piqued that he did not take part in Woodward’s previous book, Fear, which reached damning conclusions about his administration, so was determined to give his version of events for Rage.

Because he’s too dim and too narcissistic – both! – to realize that his version would only damn him further.

As Woodward recalls of this “surreal time” starting last December, Trump initiated seven phone calls, sometimes at 10pm, sometimes at weekends. The author had to keep a tape recorder to hand at all times.

10 pm. Who the hell calls people – non-intimates – at 10 pm?

Stupid question. Trump. … Read the rest

Catherine Bennett analogizes misogynist abuse of Rowling to the abuse of Salman Rushdie when the fatwa was issued:

Anyone who was around for the Rushdie fatwa may have been reminded of remarks by some eminent UK figures to the effect that, since he had caused actual book burnings and whatnot, he really should have known better. You often got the impression that a British-born target would have elicited more sympathy. “I would not shed a tear,” said the historian Lord Dacre, “if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.”

He wasn’t One of Us, and neither is Rowling.

In the case of Troubled Blood, not much changed after